Reality Echo
Reality Echo
James Axler
Earth remains the volatile prize of aeons of war and domination by two panterrestrial races. Returning the fight to these inhuman overlords, the Cerberus rebels are the champions of the planet's postapocalyptic dark ages.They spark a uniquely human resilience and courage to stand down the forces of infinitely powerful, perhaps unstoppable entities in the ongoing war to retake Earth for humanity. The Bluegrass range, ripe with secrets and magic, hides the operating base of a race of monstrous genetic mutations, faithful servants of an ancient overlord. As Kane and the rebels stage their reconnaissance, the shocking new face of an old nemesis enters the fray. As this crossspatial cyborg replicates himself as Kane and breaches humanity's last defense, he may well succeed in wiping the mountains–and their inhabitants–off the face of Earth permanently.
Kane couldn’t shake the feeling of familiarity in the enemy’s voice
“I’m not here to kill you. I don’t even want to seriously hurt you, because my real contention is with the errant young Sam.”
“He likes to call himself Enlil, now,” Kane corrected. He struggled to focus his eyes, but the shove of a warm, human-feeling hand left him swinging. “You want Enlil, so you do what…lure us out here to hang us up like beef?”
“The enemy of my enemy is…”
“Let me see your damn face!” Kane growled.
“Touchy, touchy,” the Thrush-thing replied. He stepped back and, finally, Kane’s vision was clear enough and focused enough for him to see that the metallic-toned voice had come from his own face. Hard, predator-sharp blue eyes glinted to match the cruel smile on the doppelganger Kane’s lips. It was identical to him, right down to the amount of scruffy beard growth on his jaw and the faint remnant of a scar on his cheek.
Reality Echo
Outlanders
James Axler
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!
—Jean Jacques Rousseau
1712–1778
On the Inequality among Mankind
The deadliest weapon I’ve ever seen used is a lie. It can crumble nations and slay hundreds without effort. Only knowledge and truth can dispel a lie’s wrongs, yet it is a battle to spread the facts, and no truth can revive those who have fallen.
—Brigid Baptiste, scholar and warrior
The Road to Outlands—
From Secret Government Files to the Future
Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.
Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.
What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.
Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.
In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.
Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.
But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?
Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.
Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.
For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.
After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.
With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 1
Sitting on the rock, his long legs drawn up to his chest, Grant’s hulking frame bore a passing resemblance to a large gargoyle carved from jet-black obsidian. Though Grant was silent, Brigid Baptiste could tell that the ex-Magistrate was on edge. Too often, opponents of the Cerberus warriors had mistaken the phenomenal power of the massive man’s limbs for a lack of intelligence, underestimating him at their own peril.
As a Magistrate in Cobaltville, one of the fortified baronies that rose from the wastelands of postapocalyptic America, Grant and his partner, Kane, developed the resourcefulness to deal with nearly any crisis. Grant also honed a set of observational skills that complemented Brigid’s keen intellect and Kane’s nearly preternatural instincts. That sharp mind had also made the big warrior one of the best pilots that Brigid had ever seen, adept at flying all manner of aircraft and capable of getting a damaged ship up and running with a minimum of tools.
The turmoil presently consuming Grant stemmed from the fact that Kane had been sent off on a solo quest to satisfy the Appalachian witch Epona and her cadre of mountain scouts. Grant had been opposed to such a handicap situation, but Kane conceded for the sake of diplomacy.
“Damn fool,” Grant’s deep voice grumbled, startling Brigid from her reverie.
“He can handle himself,” Brigid argued.
Grant’s dark eyes swiveled. The glare of momentary annoyance faded as he regarded her in his peripheral vision. “We all can. But I can still say this situation sucks.”
Brigid nodded in agreement. She turned back toward where Granny Epona sat with her protective cordon of mountain folk. The term “Granny” was a misnomer, as the water witch had the body of a woman in her twenties, lean and tight corded muscles beneath her protective furs and leathers. Her face, windburned to a deep tan by the cold mountaintop winds of this stretch of the Poconos in what used to be known as Pennsylvania, was relatively unlined, making any determination of her age difficult, though Brigid guessed that the woman was between forty and sixty. A breeze plucked at Epona’s black hair, tugging it aside like a curtain so that Brigid was able to see the water witch in profile.
This was the second time that Brigid had met the woman. Their first meeting was when Brigid, Kane and Grant had arrived via interphaser to negotiate for the release of a small team of Cerberus explorers who had stumbled upon the mountain folk. Initially Epona and her people had been suspicious of outlanders, but their fear of outside interference was tempered by enough reason that the Appalachians didn’t execute them on the spot. It was a reprieve from the usual first contact that the three outlanders encountered, one of cold peace, both sides afraid to trust each other but too smart to make the first hostile move. Something had changed about Epona since then, and the flame-haired former archivist couldn’t quite place it. Given her observational skills and eidetic memory, the incongruence nibbled at her, but there was nothing concrete to quantify her suspicions.
Epona looked up, as if she had noticed the attention locked on to her. “Has Kane appeared at the tree line?”
“No,” Brigid answered.
Grant’s lips curled in a sneer, but he kept his voice low so only Brigid could hear him. “You know, with our Commtacts, those primitive screwheads wouldn’t hear Kane even if he did turn his on.”
Brigid sighed and fingered the Commtact attached to her jaw. The tiny unit was a two-part man-machine interface developed by Cerberus techs with the help of the scientists of Manitius. The little comm unit worn on the outside hooked up to implanted steel pintels and allowed Brigid to communicate with her partners, as well as keep in touch across the globe with the Cerberus redoubt, which served as their home. Thanks to a series of satellites controlled from the redoubt’s depths, the Commtact signal was strong and clear almost anywhere on the face of the Earth.
The insert implanted on her mandible was voice activated and utilized vibrations in the bone mass to allow her to hear without anyone else listening in. She could also speak so softly that someone only a few feet away wouldn’t hear, but her jaw would transmit the sound to the Commtact in a way that it would be clear and audible to anyone with a proper receiving unit. More than once, since the addition of the Commtact to their regular gear, Brigid and her allies had been able to covertly communicate with one another, even under all but the closest scrutiny.
“I’m going to have to teach that boy to turn his Commtact on,” Grant said.
“That would be breaking the spirit of our deal, stranger,” Epona answered.
Brigid whirled, surprised at the silence with which the witch woman had moved, but only momentarily. Epona traveled with mountain scouts who were as stealthy a group of hunters as Brigid had ever seen, rivaling even Sky Dog’s tribe.
Epona continued after both Cerberus explorers took note of her presence. “Would you rather your friend dishonor your people by being a liar?”
Grant’s eyes narrowed. “It’s funny you should mention honor, witch. Where I come from, it’s considered an affront to let your friend walk into a fucking trap just because you want to impress the natives. Something about loyalty and concern for those who’ve watched out for you. Know anything about that?”
Brigid bit her upper lip, both to kill the smile that threatened to cross her face and to bite back an apology for her friend’s rudeness. Sometimes Grant forgot the adage that you could draw more flies with honey than vinegar, but that was the big ex-Magistrate’s way. Kane had often joked that Grant wasn’t happy unless he was complaining about how miserable he was.
Epona smirked. “Your loyalty does your friend honor. Just remember, we are the ones who invited you here. And I am the lawmaker of my people.”
Grant rolled his eyes and turned his attention to Brigid. “She must be confusing us with some other group of travelers.”
Brigid smiled. “Behave, Grant.”
Grant managed a grin. “Where’s the joy in that?”
He settled back down, staring toward the tree line.
The rules of this particular engagement were simple. In order to open up diplomatic channels between the Appalachians and the Cerberus redoubt, Kane had to go into the forest of this particular valley. Hidden among the trees lurked a race of genetic mutations that had taken to calling themselves the Fomorians, claiming to be the descendants of the beings who menaced the Tuatha de Danaan.
Nothing in Brigid’s studies of the interactions of the panterrestrial entities she knew as the Tuatha de Danaan suggested that the Fomorians were anything but Annunaki, whose roles in the history of humanity had been misinterpreted after years of permutations of the original stories. Brigid was aware that according to the creation legends of the Celts, the Fomorians were allegedly the predecessors of the more human-centric god entities, a parallel tale to the relations between the Hellenic pantheon of Olympian gods and their forebears, the Titans. According to information that Brigid had gleaned from various sources, the Tuatha de Danaan and the Annunaki had warred terribly, thus giving her the impression that those recorded as the malformed and misshapen Fomorians were actually Annunaki, or rather, one of their servant races, which were currently known as the Nephilhim.
Only after the two godlike races had come to peace, and chose to create a supervisory hybrid race known as the Archons, did they fade from the forefront of interaction with humanity. The Archons had been crossbreeds, possessing genetic material of both great races, as well as the stuff of human DNA in them, serving as a bridge between the three species. The hybrid creatures had been charged with retarding human potential, keeping humankind from growing too powerful, lest they grow strong enough to resist the panterrestrial overlords as they slept or lived out their retirement in other dimensions.
Brigid decided to throw a few questions at Epona, as long as she was present. The mystery of what the Fomorians actually were had weighed too much for her to keep her tongue still.
“Your enemies claim to be actual descendants of the Fomorians of Celtic myth?” she asked the Appalachian headwoman.
Epona glanced sidelong at Brigid, as if weighing her response. “You doubt our assertion?”
Brigid shook her head. “I’m just trying to fit this in to what we know about the Tuatha de Danaan.”
“Our forebears,” Epona stated.
Brigid’s brow wrinkled. According to what she knew about Appalachian granny magic in the wake of the Cerberus explorers’ first encounter with Epona and her people, the arts of magic they used were supposedly imported with the Scottish and Irish immigrants who had first arrived on American shores back in the late 1700s. Given the region that they had originated in, it was likely that the isolated and secretive water witches and witch doctors who practiced the arts had links extending back to the Tuatha de Danaan. The only thing that stuck awkwardly in Brigid’s evaluation of Epona’s veracity was that the practitioners of granny magic tended to locate farther south than the Pennsylvanian Poconos, the original territory stretching from the Virginias down to Georgia, where the remote location of their territories allowed the immigrants to retain the ancient Irish and Scottish songs, dances and recipes far more easily than their island predecessors who were dragged into modern society by being made part of Great Britain.
“You seem doubtful of my story. Is it because we’re not in our traditional homelands?” Epona asked.
“That’s part of it,” Brigid said.
Epona smiled. “We migrated in the wake of the great war. Rather than displace people in valleys that weren’t affected by the nuclear bombs, we wandered until we finally settled here. However, if you wish to check our genealogy, we first originated in Georgia. I assume you explorers have traveled there.”
Brigid nodded. “Radioactive fallout zones in Georgia would have forced a migration to more hospitable climes. But what about the Fomorians?”
“The Fomorian warriors who hound the mountain folk were often like us. It was the touch of Bres the Beautiful that awoke the true power within those we thought were merely men,” Epona explained.
Brigid’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t particularly like the reverence that tinged the Appalachian woman’s words. When Epona’s gaze focused on the worry in her features, Brigid pressed on. “Bres the Beautiful, who was the son of Balor, the leader of the Fomorians, correct? He’s still alive after all these millennia?”
Epona smiled unnervingly. “You came to us seeking information on whether Enlil, one of the Sumerian gods, was using one of the many valleys in the Appalachians as a potential hideout. An Annunaki can live for thousands of years, but a son of the beings who fathered the Tuatha de Danaan cannot?”
“In our defense, Enlil and his kin were stored inside of the genetic codes of their descendants until they could be awakened by a signal from their great ship Tiamat,” Brigid said. “They hadn’t been awake the whole time. However, we have encountered another Tuatha, the being known as Maccan.”
“Aengus,” Epona corrected. “His true name is Aengus, son of Dagda, high king of the Tuatha de Danaan and Boann.”
A smile crossed Epona’s lips. Brigid anticipated the source of the granny witch’s humor as her studies of the Tuatha de Danaan sprang to the forefront of her infallible memory. “Boann, who has among her other identities the goddess Brigid.”
Epona nodded knowingly. “It is good to speak with an outsider who knows of our faith.”
Brigid returned the smile. “It’s more a case of occupational necessity. The figures you worship are still alive and well in some form or another. They and their Annunaki counterparts are precisely the reason why making an alliance with you is so vital.”
“Even with the aid of every mountain scout among my people, the Appalachians stretch for thousands of miles. We have not been able to locate the heart of the Fomorian base of operations—what makes you think we would be any more useful in ascertaining whether Enlil and his kin have taken refuge in one of our valleys?” Epona asked.
“Because at least you are a set of eyes and ears in this area. Indeed, you contacted us simply because the Fomorians seemed to be increasing their intelligence and the quality of their equipment,” Brigid pointed out. “Otherwise, you would not have made use of the radio we left behind for you.”
“Well played, Brigid,” Epona said. “There are some things we are not capable of handling. The Fomorians were balanced against us because we at least had the advantage of homemade rifles crafted by our gunsmiths while they relied more upon their brute strength and natural endurance. However, things have shifted.”
Brigid glanced at one of the mountain scouts. The man sat on a rock, a five-foot-long rifle resting between his knees. Though she was not one who took much interest in the minutiae of musketry, it didn’t take a firearm fanatic to realize the quality and art involved in the production of the long weapon, nor was it any surprise that the rifle’s bore was designed to fire cartridges that were meant for more than any normal person. Externally, the arms that the scouts carried were hand-carved wood and steel, the wooden furniture painted and adorned with runes to bless them. The steel barrels were set into heavy firing mechanisms, single-shot bolt action by their appearance, and there was no mistaking the half-inch cavernous hole at the end of the long tube. Taking the opportunity to get a closer look at one of the long brass fangs that were stuffed into a belt loop around the scout’s waist, she recognized the .50-caliber cartridge that was the same type that Grant used for one of his favorite weapons, the M-85 Barrett.
The fact that the scouts chose this as their primary rifle caliber when it was likely that they would encounter their hated enemies meant that the Fomorians were not simply deformed humans, but creatures of phenomenal strength.
“You said that Kane would recognize them when he saw them,” Brigid said. “Unfortunately, I don’t recall any past lives as he does. How did you, er, recognize him?”
Epona chuckled. “I would be a poor water witch if I could not identify the modern embodiment of Cuchulainn.”
Brigid’s lip curled at the mention of that name. It was what Fand, the half Tuatha de Danaan and half Annunaki daughter of Enlil, had insisted on calling Kane. She claimed that he was her destined lover, reborn in order to reunite with her. Though Brigid’s affection for Kane wasn’t of a lustful nature, the thought of Fand sinking her claws into Kane was repulsive. He wasn’t particularly interested in the long-lived demigoddess himself, a surprise considering that Fand was a statuesque being who could have been a Greek sculpture come to life.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got some kind of link to Cuchulainn,” Brigid spoke up.
“No, but you can’t begrudge me a girlish crush on such a hero, can you?” Epona asked.
Brigid clenched her eyes shut. She finally opened one eye, glancing out of the corner toward Grant, whose face was split with a broad smile.
“You’d think Kane was some kind of immature wish-fulfillment fantasy, all the women he gets,” Brigid complained.
“Maybe this time you’ll get some interest,” Grant said.
Brigid raised an eyebrow. “As good-looking as Bres the Beautiful sounds, I don’t think I want to be genetically manipulated to become a Fomorian. From what I’ve heard, my options are missing limbs, missing eyes or the head of a goat.”
Epona studied Brigid for a moment. “You would not be changed. There is nothing of the blood in you.”
“Your granny-witch sight, lady?” Grant asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I can see Cuchulainn in your friend. I can see Fomorian tendencies, or the lack of, in you two,” Epona said. “Do not fear, large one.”
Grant waved her off dismissively. “Whatever.”
Something crackled in the distance, and Brigid’s and Grant’s ears instantly picked it up as the sound of gunfire.
“Kane?” Brigid asked as the Sin Eater snapped into Grant’s grasp.
Chapter 2
When the crackle of gunfire cut through the quiet mountain air, Grant sprung to his full height, his Sin Eater deploying instantly, launched by a flex of his forearm muscles. The microelectric motors attached to the machine pistol’s holster allowed the weapon to be readied instantly, but the demanding weapon required six months of training before a Magistrate could be trusted with a loaded Sin Eater. Grant kept his trigger finger straight as the gun unfolded, grip deposited right into his grasp. Had the digit remained crooked, then the weapon would have launched a 240-grain specially loaded 9 mm bullet, a powerhouse round designed to penetrate the most durable of body armor, even the cockpit of a Deathbird assault helicopter.
To Brigid Baptiste’s credit, the woman had pulled her TP-9 pistol and was ready a heartbeat later. Grant wondered how the beautiful, flame-haired former archivist would take his amazement at how she went from a quiet, bespectacled academic to a confident, adventure-hardened explorer of a hostile world. She had never settled into the overly macho, paramilitary mind-set that had surrounded Grant and Kane in the barracks while they were still Cobaltville Mags, but despite that, she’d forged herself into a warrior. She didn’t rely on false pride and bravado rather than genuine courage to face barbaric or powerful opponents.
Indeed, Grant often wondered at the quality of the Magistrate corps had not the hybrid barons not segregated the ville societies and allowed women to be part of the armored warrior caste that formed the core of their power. That thought evaporated as soon as it struck the light of his logic. The barons had been corrupt, and their sexist segregation had been designed to keep humankind on its knees. To combine both strength and intellect in a person, and to break the limiting bonds of a caste hierarchy, would have made humans less likely to assent to being slaves of a little seen, secretive society of hybrid beings. Grant had only one name, as did Kane and all the other Magistrates, a move calculated to strip the black-armored warriors of any individual identity. It was exceedingly rare for Magistrates to develop intense bonds of friendship and loyalty to anything other than the barons, which was probably why the two partners had so readily slipped the bonds of their orders.
Kane made Grant a little more human, and the reverse was true. That little touch of compassion, a link to another person, had given them both the strength to see the corruption of the villes and break loose. Brigid had been part of that process, as well, giving Kane another anchor of human emotion that the rulers of the baronies had sought to crush. Grant had expanded his own worldview in the form of a friendship with the feral child of the Outlands they knew as Domi. At first, Grant and Domi had been opponents, the young outlander employed by a smuggling ring under the Pit boss Guana Teague. However, an act of compassion on Grant’s part for Domi, as she was wounded and abused by the sluglike Teague, had formed a bond between them. For a long time, Domi had acted as if it was something inspired by sexual attraction, but the bright young feral woman and Grant finally realized that their bond was more along the line of surrogate father and daughter, especially when Grant became romantically involved with Shizuka, the leader of the Tigers of Heaven. The love between Grant and Domi was as strong as ever, but it had found its true form, rather than the sexual tension that had first developed.
Returning to Brigid, Grant realized that though he and Kane often joked about Brigid’s predilection to launch into an educational lecture, her relentless pursuit and sharing of knowledge was infectious. Both Kane and Grant had been spurred to learn about the world before civilization was burned to ashes in nuclear fire, and to seek out lore that extended far beyond their old worldview as dictated by the barons. Where Brigid became physically adept and skilled in the arts of war, Kane and Grant saw their intellectual horizons broadened.
Rounding out the three aspects of mind, body and soul, it didn’t escape Grant’s notice that Kane’s presence in their lives had been an escape from a single-minded existence. Brigid Baptiste could have spent her entire life poring over historical artifacts and records without seeking human companionship, and Grant could have been condemned to a life where he relentlessly soldiered for Cobaltville until he died. The compassion and friendship that Kane had added to their lives was the agent of change that made everything possible.
It was Kane who had the curiosity to seek out the strange matter-transfer device utilized by Teague’s smugglers. It was Kane who questioned the authority that told him to look away. It was Kane who saw that there was something more than just what was in front of their eyes. Certainly, Kane himself was a physically adept and capable warrior, and he had a keen perception that at times bordered on psychic sensitivity, but the man who had gone alone into the valley at Epona’s request was not just a warrior or a seeker of knowledge. He sought out what was right; he was a man with a moral core that had chafed under orders to kill and crush rebellion, who felt more at home being a defender of those who couldn’t fight back, or helping those in need. Kane’s strength and intellect were slaves to a spirit that was driven to the service of others.
The smart thing for Kane to have done would have been to turn his back on Epona so the Cerberus explorers could have returned to the redoubt without a second thought of risking themselves. The right thing, however, was what Kane chose. The Appalachian mountain folk were under siege by a cruel and implacable enemy that had been given an edge by a mysterious foe. Allowing the Fomorians to continue unabated would result in suffering and unchecked evil.
In his readings, Grant came across a line by Edmund Burke. “For evil to succeed, all that is needed is for good men to do nothing.”
Grant wondered, with all those women who saw Kane’s “soul,” if any had ever read those words tattooed across his heart, because there was never a more defining quote for his friend and partner.
It was five hundred feet downslope to the edge of the pine forest that clung tenaciously to the mountainside, which was just outside of the range of his Sin Eater’s normal deployment parameters. With another flex of his forearm, the electric motors retracted the machine pistol, folding it from its active thirteen-inch length to only six inches, lying flatly against his forearm. The motorized holster clicked as the Sin Eater returned to its resting spot. It was time to make use of something more appropriate for the situation.
Grant opened his rifle bag and drew out one of his favorite pieces of equipment, the five-and-a-half-foot-long Barrett M-85 .50-caliber rifle. Designed in the twentieth century as a means of allowing a ground soldier to stave off armored fighting vehicles short of a tank, the Barrett could hurl its missiles over two miles. Though it was only a single shot, it utilized .50-caliber Browning machine gun ammunition and held eleven rounds when fully loaded. A smaller man would have had trouble hauling around the thirty-pound rifle, but it fit comfortably in Grant’s massive hands.
Grant had wondered if it had been overkill to bring such a handheld cannon to this mission, but when he saw that the Appalachian scouts had their own .50-caliber long rifles, he knew that he hadn’t overreacted. Whoever the Fomorians were, they were creatures of impressive strength and durability, requiring more than standard small-arms fire to stop conclusively.
All of that information only served to worry Grant more about Kane and his fate. The Sin Eaters were powerful side arms, having proved their worth against heavily armored foes such as the Nephilhim drones in the service of the Annunaki, or Magistrate stormtroopers in their black, impregnable polycarbonate shells, but as the mountain folk had all manner of calibers at their disposal to deploy against the man-eating mutants that tormented them, their choice of arm was telling. The riflelike power of the Sin Eater might wound, but only the steel-smashing force of a .50-caliber round was sufficient for the Appalachians to trust against the Fomorians.
“You cannot move until Kane is in plain sight!” Epona said.
Grant glared at the witch woman, his rage only barely under control. “Do I look like I’m getting off this fucking rock?”
“Mind yourself, stranger,” Epona warned.
Grant turned away, pushing the aggravating witch out of his thoughts. It was time to do everything he could to watch over his best friend in the world. That meant pulling up the hood folded into the collar of his shadow suit. The fabric sheathed the big man’s head, conforming to it snugly as if it had been grown as a second skin for him. In truth, the high-tech polymers of the shadow suit were pliant enough to fit anyone who wore one, stretching or contracting, yet giving up none of its environmental protection capabilities.
But Grant hadn’t donned the hood to keep out a chill. Instead, he drew the face piece of the shadow suit, a rolled-up mask kept in a flat pocket, and affixed it to the edges of the hood. An electrostatic charge gave an inaudible crackle before the unit was sealed to his skull. Though the mask was opaque to outside viewers, as soon as the charge hooked the mask in place, Grant was able to see through the circuitry laden fabric.
Though Grant had hated squeezing into old Magistrate armor suits, he had enjoyed the advanced optics and communications abilities built into the Mag helmets. It had taken months of experimentation with the shadow suits to convince the veteran Grant that they offered the same sensory enhancements as the Mag helmets, except in a far more compact and portable form. As well, with the hood tucked into the collar and the face piece folded away, the shadow suits were far less imposing than the ominous black helmets and polycarbonate armor shells of old. Grant still pulled a jacket and pants over the shadow suit sometimes, to give himself some pockets and a modicum of modesty. The skintight uniform conformed to every contour of his body, so while he might have been able to walk through an Antarctic blizzard without feeling a single chill, he wore pants to keep his sense of decency.
Grant focused his eyes, and the remarkable technology built into the mask interpreted his eye movements and magnified his vision. Suddenly, it was as if he was only five feet away from the tree line, and Grant swept the forest, looking for signs of Kane. Gunshots cracked, and the magnification dropped back to zero, a green heads-up circle showing in Grant’s vision. He adjusted his gaze to that spot where the suit had picked up the sound. All he could see were trees, but now Grant had at least an idea where Kane was on the slope.
“Can you see anything?” Brigid asked, unfurling her own hood and drawing out her face mask.
“No, but apparently the suits can pick up the origin points of loud sounds,” Grant said.
Brigid nodded, affixing her face mask into place. “Like that last gunshot.”
The former archivist turned to Epona. “This isn’t violating the letter of your law, is it?”
Grant smirked behind the safety and anonymity of his faceplate. Though environmentally he wouldn’t even feel the iciest breeze, a chill ran through him at the sound of Brigid’s question to Epona. Diplomacy and courtesy were all fine, but right now, Kane was shooting at something, and from the sound of things, he wasn’t having an easy time.
Epona shook her head in response to the barbed question. “Just remember, you can only go to Kane’s aid when he is in plain sight to us. Who knows how far you can see into the forest with your technology, but we are not gifted like you.”
Grant’s fist clenched around his Barrett, tendons creaking under his polymer glove. “Trust me, witch. If I could see him right now, I’d tell you hillbillies to go piss uphill.”
“Behave,” Brigid admonished, though this time her heart wasn’t in the warning. She gripped the handles of her Copperhead submachine gun with as much tension as Grant felt. He couldn’t see her knuckles through the black polymer of her gloves, but he knew that she was as white-knuckled with concern for Kane as he was.
Grant stared, as if trying to command the shadow suit to spontaneously develop the power of X-ray vision to peer through tree trunks and other foliage as if they were made of glass. He rested the Barrett’s steel-girder-like stock on his thick, powerful thigh, because even his powerful shoulders couldn’t hold the heavy rifle aloft forever. Crouched deeply, resting on his haunches, Grant was poised to explode, but the fuse burned far too slowly for his taste.
He activated his Commtact, opening a connection back to Cerberus redoubt, where Lakesh, Bry and others were watching the events of this mission as closely as they could.
“Bry, you there?” Grant asked.
“Nah. I’m in the middle of a Three Stooges marathon and eating bonbons,” the computer expert replied with his typical, laid-back sarcasm.
Grant rolled his eyes. “Do you have anything that could make this wait a little more bearable?”
“There’s only so much I can do with a virtual reality girlfriend for you,” Bry answered, but Grant could hear the clatter of his fingertips across a keyboard as he commanded the network of satellites from his computer console. Bry’s acerbic, bored tone was the young genius’s armor against a world of panic and emergency.
“Kane,” Brigid said over the communications link. “Where is he now?”
All the Cerberus personnel had been fitted with subcutaneous biolink transponders that, among other things, allowed Cerberus redoubt to monitor their whereabouts.
“Range?” Grant asked, rising off his haunches. “Bry, give me—”
“He’s 4200 feet from your position, which means 3700 from the tree line,” Bry answered. “He’s getting closer.”
“But still not in plain sight,” Grant growled.
“Where is he?” Epona asked. Anxiety and concern had crept into her voice. Whether it was genuine worry for Kane and the people standing watch for him, or it was fear of reprisal from an angry Grant, it was a disarming change.
“Still a long run from the tree line,” Grant told her. “It’s a two-way shooting match now, so that means one of the Fomorians has an assault rifle.”
“More than one,” Epona warned. “That’s why we called you for help.”
“So you’ve got mutant freaks who need 50-caliber rifles to kill them now armed with assault weapons, and you told us to send one of our own after them while he’s outnumbered and outmuscled?” Grant snapped. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”
“Kane told us that he was as silent as the wind and twice as hard to capture,” Epona said. “We figured that he would be stealthy and not end up on the run from a superhuman horde with high-tech weapons!”
Grant was tempted to rip his face mask off his hood, but he needed its advanced optics to keep an eye on Kane. Luckily, his hood’s sensors picked up the chatter of more automatic weapons. “What’s Kane’s range to the tree line, Bry?”
“Now 3400 feet. He’s not making much progress, and according to the audio pickups on your hood, there are four hostiles shooting at him,” Bry informed him.
“Four,” Grant grumbled. The bark of a Sin Eater was amplified by the hood’s sensors. He shouldered his rifle, even though there was no way that someone could see through 1100 yards of tree trunks. The rifle was something solid to hold on to, a firm piece of reality that was an anchor when all he had were electronic ghost images thrown against his eyeballs. Intelligence hurled at him was not a substitute for his personal senses. Sight, hearing, touch—he trusted those much more than some anonymous computer setup. He wanted tactile feedback.
Instead, all he could do was wait and hope for a single glimpse of Kane, if he somehow managed to fight his way past a quartet of superhuman mutants.
Chapter 3
Brigid Baptiste glared at Granny Epona, then made a decision. She wasn’t one given to brash action, but right now she knew that something was wrong with the whole situation. Epona had gone from stating that Kane’s scouting mission was one of honor to stating that he was sent because he could move with ghostlike grace among the trees in order to determine the machinations that had been involved in the upgrade of the Fomorian raiders’ equipment. At the very least, Epona was hiding something.
Brigid swiftly went into Grant’s war bag, drew out a .45-caliber SIG-Sauer P-220 pistol and its spare magazines strapped together in a shoulder holster sized for her slender, athletic frame. The big ex-Magistrate spotted the activity, and she could imagine his eyebrow quirking underneath the opaque black hood of his shadow suit. The .45-caliber pistol had been something that Brigid had asked Grant to carry for her ever since their encounter with the mad cybergoddess Hera in New Olympus, a decision reinforced by a subsequent battle against the nanotechnologically enhanced Durga. Her little TP-9 pistol might have been more than enough to deal with ordinary threats, but against superhuman beings, she’d developed the opinion that bigger was indeed better. Since the TP-9 couldn’t fire the same kind of superheavy slugs that the Sin Eater ate like gumdrops, the only way to deal with armor plating was to go with a bigger, more powerful gun.
“Granny Epona, you can tell your men to go piss uphill,” Brigid said, tightening the SIG’s holster straps. “Kane needs us.”
With that, she turned and began to sprint down the slope toward the tree line.
“Brigid!” Grant’s voice bellowed over her Commtact.
Brigid wished that she had the ability to talk, but at the moment, she was concentrating on keeping her balance and avoiding obstacles. She’d hoped that she would reach the tree line and that a pine tree would stop her headlong progress, but now even her intellect raced, throwing up a series of possibilities that ended up with her encountering an impact that would overwhelm the shadow suit’s protective capabilities.
“Brigid, stop now!” Grant bellowed over the Commtact.
The force of Grant’s order, transmitted through her jawbone, made it seem as if he had taken control of her body. She shot her feet out, ramrod straight, and her heels sank into the soft shale. She’d passed down the slope to a point where the ground had softened into soil and areas of mossy scrub. By extending her legs, she’d applied the brakes and slowed enough that she could control her descent.
“Thanks,” Brigid said.
She could feel Grant’s smile, even over the radio. “Anytime, Brigid.”
Brigid stopped only twenty feet from the edge of the trees. Looking back, she could see where she’d first straightened out and the furrows her heels had cut through the slope as she’d slowed. She pulled her .45 from its holster. “I don’t see anything yet down here, Grant. Do you?”
“Not a damn thing,” Grant responded. “Nothing on the suit optics nor through the Barrett’s scope. You go into the woods too far, you’ll be on your own.”
“Not going to try my way down?” Brigid asked.
“I’ll be along,” Grant responded. “Just a little slower.”
Brigid scanned uphill and saw the big ex-Magistrate running, jumping and dodging to avoid boulders. She could see why he was reluctant to turn himself into a human avalanche, as the Barrett was not as easily portable as the heavy pistol she carried. The rifle would either serve as a brutal clothesline that would catch on something and do its best to cleave Grant in two, or the weapon would shatter important parts, leaving it useless as a firearm and left only as a clumsy, unwieldy club.
“I’ll stay in touch,” Brigid said, and she charged into the trees, relying on the heads-up optics in her faceplate to plot Kane’s last known positions by the sound of his Sin Eater.
“Just remember, that .45 is nowhere nearly as potent as the rifles the scouts and I are carrying,” Grant said. “If you have to shoot, aim for the face, not the forehead. The area around the nose—”
“Yes. The area around the nose has the weakest maxillofacial bone structure, enabling the surest incapacitation on a head shot,” Brigid replied. “You act like I don’t have a photographic memory.”
“Well, it’s not as if I’m feeling particularly useful jogging down a mountainside five hundred feet behind you,” Grant growled. “Leave me something to feel worthwhile.”
“Sorry,” Brigid said. She remembered that Kane’s Commtact wasn’t activated. Calling out loud might draw Kane’s attention, but that might serve as a distraction that would allow the Fomorians to fall upon him and crush the life out of him. Furthermore, a shout would just as likely turn Kane’s attention from survival to concern for her.
Brigid had spent years forging herself from an academic into an equal partner to her two warrior allies. She refused to put herself in the position of a walking disaster, the role of someone whose presence only served to expose the team to more dangers. She operated a control interface on the forearm of her shadow suit, and the black polymer suddenly shimmered and took on the pattern of the surrounding forest floor. The real-time, adaptive camouflage, while it wouldn’t offer true invisibility, would turn the Cerberus explorer into a shadow among the trees. If Kane was in trouble, her sudden arrival wouldn’t break his concentration, and she’d have the element of surprise against any creature endeavoring to tear the man limb from limb.
“I’ve gone camouflage, Grant,” she said over her Commtact.
“Remember to stay out of the cross fire,” Grant offered. “And don’t forget, your shoulder harness isn’t camouflaged.”
Brigid looked down at her shoulder, seeing the nylon-and-leather holster strap visible against her optic digital camouflage. She wrinkled her nose. “Noted. Thank you.”
She padded off into the pine trees, heading toward where she’d last heard the sounds of battle.
Brigid scrambled through the woods, keeping herself close to the trees but avoiding branches so that she minimized the commotion of her passage. There were more factors at moving unnoticed than having an electronically enhanced fabric adapt like a chameleon to its background, and she was fortunate to have a teacher in Kane who had schooled her in the arts of stealth. Up ahead in a clearing she spotted Kane, stripped naked to the waist and battling a tall, gangly monstrosity. The cyclopean beast screeched in untamed fury as it struggled with the half-naked Cerberus warrior in its arms.
Brigid considered taking a shot at the Fomorian warrior, but Kane thrashed violently, twisting to keep the deadly bear hug around his torso from tightening. The deceptively slender hunter’s forearms were cabled masses of muscle and sinew that looked to have the strength of anacondas, and the moment his adversary had a solid grasp, Kane’s ribs and spine would be subjected to a lethal crushing force. With the two opponents wrestling fiercely, there was no way that Brigid could take a clean shot without the possibility of hitting Kane.
She stuffed the handgun back into its holster and scanned around for something that would be more useful. She spotted a thick branch on the ground and scooped it up. Still practically invisible as anything other than a blurred wraith, she lunged toward the Fomorian, swinging her wooden club at the back of the its knees. The creature’s long, strong legs buckled in instantaneous reaction to the impact. Despite the superhuman physique and size of the mutant, it still had basic human anatomy, and Brigid had reasoned that it also had basic human reflex. The crash of the branch across the back of its knees inspired an automatic bending of the creature’s legs. That, combined with Kane’s struggles on top of it, forced the Fomorian to crash to the ground.
The Cerberus warrior hammered his fist violently into the monstrosity’s throat, punching again and again with every ounce of his strength. Kane’s physique had placed the bulk of his muscle mass in his upper chest and shoulders, and now, as if he were some beast-reared jungle lord, he unleashed that power. His back and shoulders flexed and rippled with each downward stroke, the smack of his fist on the mutant’s vulnerable face and throat cracking through the forest. There was no grace, no art in this beating; the time for unarmed combat finesse had disappeared the moment Kane had been stripped of weaponry and forced to fight tooth and claw. The Fomorian hunter’s nose was a bloody pit in the center of his skull, and twisted lips coughed up a torrent of gore from where Kane’s fist had crushed its windpipe. Its arms flailed helplessly, trying to block the maddened assault, but in the end, it was useless.
Brigid knew that Kane would never die easily, and this day, he’d fought off the hounds of death seeking his soul.
“Baptiste?” Kane asked, bursting from his opponent’s grasp.
“Yes,” she said. She tapped her forearm, canceling the camouflage effect. Brigid looked the man over and saw that his forehead had been split open, a ragged gash that seeped blood into his eyes. His legs had a wobble to them, but he fought against the urge to collapse, shoulders rising and falling as he breathed deeply to regain his composure. “What happened?”
“I was jumped,” Kane murmured. “Everything since then’s been kind of blurry. I don’t even know where my weapons went.”
Brigid slid out of her shoulder harness. “Take this, then.”
Kane blinked, looking at the pistol and spare magazines in their holster. He looked confused for a moment, but slid his arms through the shoulder loops and drew the handgun. “When did you start carrying this?”
“I’ve had Grant keep a spare gun for me in his war bag,” Brigid said as she knelt by the dead Fomorian. She quickly took a strip of its ragged vest and tore it free, creating a long bandage. “No reason why you’d know anything about it. Come over here.”
Kane obeyed her command without fuss, so Brigid could tell that something wasn’t completely right with him. Her best guess, given the minimal blood loss and his uncertain stance, was that he’d suffered a concussion when he’d been struck in the head. Kane was fortunate that the heavy curved bone of the skull had made his forehead one of the most difficult structures to break on the human body. Still, with the blood seeping from the wound and pouring down over his brow, he’d have a hard time seeing. She tied the bandage around his head, but didn’t knot it too tightly. Too much pressure would only aggravate any head trauma that she couldn’t see right now.
“Thanks, Baptiste,” Kane muttered. Brigid offered her shoulder to allow him to stand back up.
“You’re going to be freezing to death in a few minutes unless we get you to shelter,” Brigid said.
Kane grimaced. “I can deal with the cold for now. It’s not as bad as it is higher up on the mountain. But we should be able to borrow a blanket or some furs from Epona’s scouts, shouldn’t we?”
“I’m not sure we can trust her,” Brigid began. “Even if she is on the up and up, I broke the rules and came into the forest after you.”
Kane smirked through the pain. “I’m a bad influence on you. Big guns, and wrecking diplomacy…”
“Cut the criticism,” Brigid admonished, “and activate your Commtact.”
Kane nodded and reached behind his ear to activate his comm device. “Grant, we’re trying to concentrate here. Shut it!”
“Well, it’s about damn time!” Grant cursed. “If I hadn’t shaved my head bald, I’d be a mass of gray hair by now.”
“Listen…my head’s a little fuzzy right now and I’m trying to climb a steep mountainside while half-naked,” Kane complained. “You throwing a fit on your side of things is not making my skull ache any less, got it?”
Brigid kept an eye on Kane’s progress. His body was already shiny with a sheen of sweat, gleaming off his rippling muscles as he fought against the incline. The steep slope was an effort for her, as well, her legs burning with each push. Brigid at least had the shadow suit to regulate her perspiration and body temperature as they climbed. Once they hit the open slope, which was at six thousand feet more or less, Kane’s wet skin would be exposed to a freezing wind. Hypothermia would be inevitable, and frostbite a distinct possibility.
“All right. Did you find out anything?” Grant asked.
“Yeah. I found out that the Fomorians have some old friends of ours working with them,” Kane said. “The Thrush Continuum.”
“What?” Grant grimaced.
“I’ll explain later,” Kane answered. “Right now, I can barely make heads or tails out of anything. What kind of explosives did you bring along?”
“The usual assortment of grens and plastic explosives,” Grant replied. “You got anything special in your war bag?”
“No, but I’m thinking that we can at least drop an avalanche on the Fomorian camp on this mountainside,” Kane said. “It’s not going to be a long-term solution, but we can retreat and regroup while they’re digging themselves out of the rubble.”
Brigid and Kane continued ascending, both of them thankful for the pine tree trunks that allowed them good handholds as they fought their way uphill. Kane’s knee buckled, and he slumped against the bark of a pine, eyes clenched in momentary pain.
“Let me help,” Brigid said.
“I’ll be all right,” Kane answered breathlessly. He rummaged around in the cargo pants that he and Grant took to wearing over the lower halves of their shadow suits. Finally he ripped open a pocket and found a foil envelope within. His fingers trembled as he tore into the packet, withdrawing a rustling mass of shiny metallic sheeting. Taking the corners of the thermal blanket, he wrapped them around his neck, tying the blanket into an improvised cloak that draped around his shoulders.
“Allow me?” Brigid asked.
Kane blinked, his eyes unfocused. “Better idea?”
“Somewhat,” Brigid answered. She untied the thermal blanket and pulled a utility knife from her belt. She sliced a slit in the center large enough to fit Kane’s head through. Then she patted through his pockets until she found a roll of cord. Gathering the blanket at Kane’s waist, she left plenty of room for his arms to move freely, but cinched the blanket so that he now possessed a shiny metallic parka to shield him. “You forgot that you had this?”
“I took a whack to the head, damn it,” Kane reminded her. “Plus, I thought I could last a little longer against the cold.”
Gunfire bellowed below and Brigid whirled. “Damn it, they’ve caught up to us.”
Kane fisted the handgun that she’d lent him. “It’ll take a lot to put them down.”
Brigid shook her head. “Give me that and my magazines back. You keep climbing.”
“Damn it, Baptiste.”
“You’re injured, and you’re the brightest, shiniest target on this mountainside,” Brigid returned. “I’m in one piece, and the shadow suit makes me harder to hit. And if they do shoot me, I’ll be harder to hurt. Get moving!”
Kane glowered at her. “Just be careful. The Thrushes didn’t just give them rifles—”
“Talk later. Run now!” Brigid snapped.
Movement rustled among the pines, and she whirled to face it, bringing up the big .45. A one-armed monstrosity lurched into view, holding a SIG AMT rifle in its hand. Brigit aligned the sights and fired two shots from her pistol, aiming at the troll-like face of the Fomorian hunter, her shadow suit’s faceplate optics enabling her to focus the handgun’s point of aim as if she had a laser targeting device on the pistol. A mass of cheekbone exploded off the Fomorian’s face with the first hit, the second round carving a ghastly furrow along the creature’s bald temple. The mutant dropped its rifle and clutched its wounded face with its sole hand. Brigid cursed the haste with which she’d fired her shots, wasting ammunition and making the man-eater suffer. It may have been a murderous beast, but unnecessary cruelty had never been part of any of the three Cerberus warriors.
As it was, she had bought herself some time, and glanced back to see Kane furiously scrambling up the hill. A large form in black leaped down by his side, and Brigid nearly whirled her pistol around to fire on it when she recognized the unmistakable bulk of Grant, hooking one hand under Kane’s shoulder.
“Move it, Brigid!” Grant bellowed, hefting his massive Barrett with one rippling arm. The .50-caliber rifle bellowed authoritatively to punctuate his command. “This slope’s going to be a no-man’s-land in a minute!”
Brigid spun back and saw that Grant had put the creature she’d shot out of its misery. Muzzle-flashes flickered among the trees, but the .30-caliber rounds found only dirt and tree trunks. Two of the Fomorian hunters were back in the forest, trying to finish the job they started. Brigid stuffed her gun into her belt and clawed at the mountainside on all fours, her lean and athletically toned limbs helping her to eat the distance between herself and the two ex-Magistrates near the tree line. A tree root for a handhold here, a leap off the trunk of a pine there, and mad pawing at the dirt were what she needed to climb as she’d never climbed before.
Grant continued to thunder away with his mighty rifle, bolts of blazing hot lead slicing down to cover Brigid against the advance and harassing fire of the Fomorians. Like some form of obsidian storm god, Grant cut loose. A tree trunk shattered under the impact of one monster .50-caliber slug, and the pine tree crackled, groaned and toppled, crashing to the slope and skidding toward the Fomorians. One of those mutated hunters let out a wail of horror as the tree toppled toward him like a massive emerald spear. Its long limbs sprang and hurled it out of its path, branches shearing off against other tree trunks, producing deep gouges in the bark. The impact of the plummeting pine broke another apart, but one shank of wood held on tenaciously, so that the tree was only bent, its top half dangling like a pendulum in the wake of the one-log avalanche.
Brigid scurried up to Grant as he reloaded the Barrett. She could see the tree line just past him. Grenades and explosive charges were wired together, nudged against tree trunks and two large, flat masses of granite that broke up the incline of the slope, giving the trees something level to stand upon. Though she wasn’t an explosives expert, she knew that Grant had set the explosives in such a manner as to shear off this particular chunk of forest and hurl it down the slope like a massive guillotine of stone, dirt and wood.
“We’ve got to move,” Grant said as he slung the rifle over one broad shoulder. “Take the detonator.”
Brigid took the box, and Grant scooped up Kane as if he were a rag doll. She followed Grant as he charged uphill, cradling his injured partner and held off pressing the trigger for the mass of charges planted at the tree line. Once they were a safe distance from the blast area, Grant would know. Brigid didn’t want to make that guess. If she fired the detonator too soon, they would be swept up in the torrent. If she waited too long, more Fomorians would scurry into rifle range and dozens of rifles would chop them to ribbons.
“Do it!” Grant ordered.
Brigid thumbed the stud, and the whole mountainside heaved violently. Behind her white-hot fire faded instantly into a plume of blackened smoke and airborne ash and dust. The air crackled with the sound of rock and soil peeling off the slope under a sharp wave of energy released by Grant’s explosive setup. The crackle deepened into an all-pervasive rumble, the thick clouds sucked down along with the avalanche as the rapidly descending mass of the mountainside created a vacuum. Trees snapped and exploded under the shock wave, but as much as Brigid focused on the receding landslide, even with the telescopic optics in her shadow suit, trees she knew to be four and five feet in diameter resembled nothing more than twigs and pencils as they toppled and pinwheeled through the turgid mass. The avalanche’s height was not the only thing that grew. It widened, spreading like a fan of rocky devastation. The rumble became less of a constant storm of sound engulfing them as the mass tumbled down to the valley below, but Brigid could still feel it vibrating up through her legs.
“Was that good enough?” Grant asked Kane.
Brigid turned and looked at her partner. His steely eyes held a cold rage in them that she had rarely seen before. Whatever evil they had inflicted upon him, it had inspired a similar fury in him. The rage faded as the landslide crashed to the bottom of the valley, settling a thick fog of debris over the floor. He nodded slowly, tentatively so as not to aggravate the pain of his head injury.
“For now,” Kane said. “Now put me down. I can walk the rest of the way back.”
Grant sighed and let Kane stand on his own two feet. Brigid could see traces of his earlier wobble, but the brief respite had steeled the man’s determination to walk on his own power.
Epona and the scouts waited in a line, just farther up the slope. Epona remained silent, the shadow suit’s telescopic vision showing her features cast in dread awe of the power that Grant had unleashed, carving a horrendous scar along the side of a mountain. The scouts, on the other hand, had their rifles raised in the air, cheers for the thunderous blow struck against their Fomorian enemies echoing from on high.
“For now?” Brigid asked.
“I said these things are incredibly tough,” Kane answered, his voice taut and brittle with annoyance and pain. “We might have killed some of them and wrecked whatever equipment the Thrush Continuum provided for them, but this isn’t over yet.”
Grant sneered. “Shit. If a black hole couldn’t kill that android freak, dropping a mountain on him won’t be more than a minor inconvenience.”
“Something’s really eating at you, Kane. What’s the big worry?” Brigid asked.
Kane grimaced. “Because the Thrush that’s down there, working with Bres and Balor and the rest of those monsters, he’s wearing my face.”
Grant and Brigid shared a glance, then stared at their wounded comrade.
Kane held out both hands to Grant, a near universal symbol of surrendering himself into restraints. “And just so we’re sure that I’m not some kind of preprogrammed fake that just thinks I’m the real deal, I want you two to bind me up and make damn certain I’m not some android infiltrator sent to murder everyone in Cerberus.”
Standing on a silent, gouged mountainside, watching Grant seize Kane’s wrists roughly to put a plastic cable tie around them, Brigid Baptiste felt as if the avalanche were just a rug, pulling her whole world out from underneath her.
Chapter 4
Reba DeFore looked over Kane in the observation room of the Cerberus redoubt sick bay. In silence and darkness, Mohandas Lakesh Singh, Domi, Brigid Baptiste and Grant sat on the other side of one-way glass. No one wanted to speak as DeFore took blood samples, fingerprints, retinal scans and cheek swabs with practiced precision.
DeFore was a stocky woman with tanned skin and ash-blond hair, which she usually wore in braids. This day it was pulled back into a bun beneath her surgeon’s cap. She had served as the redoubt’s chief physician ever since its inception by Lakesh. Her knowledge of anatomy had been bolstered by years of all manner of practical application, from meatball surgery to delivering the half-human spawn of a Quad Vee hybrid in mid-transformation. While the redoubt’s personnel had all been trained in first aid, DeFore’s scientific knowledge of the human body and how it worked was remarkable. Of course, if DeFore’s talents hadn’t been impressive, Lakesh wouldn’t have recruited her for his rebellion against the tyranny of the baronies.
Kane rested on the table, poked and prodded, subjected to all manner of probes in DeFore’s collection of equipment. Lakesh and the others sat on the other side of the glass, not speaking, barely even breathing loudly as they awaited word on whether or not the man on the table was or some transdimensional construct sent to infiltrate their base.
“You know, there is the possibility that Thrush could have mentally reprogrammed a Kane from a different casement,” Brigid spoke up at the end of the second hour of examinations.
DeFore had been consistently handing off samples to her staff, Manitius base medical experts who had been upgrading and redesigning technology since relocating from their station on the moon. Where in the late twentieth century processing genetic markers could be measured in months, the new machinery they had developed pared the analysis to hours. She’d called up a readout on the screen, and the preliminary testing showed identical matches for several gene pairs, though the process had only been forty percent complete. “They’d be identical down to a genetic scale, but—”
“We know what we’re dealing with when it comes to Thrush, dearest Brigid,” Lakesh said, cutting her off. Lakesh rested his chin on the knuckles of his fist. Though born on the Indian subcontinent, the scientist had entered his third century of life with blue eyes, replacements for his original orbs, which had failed due to their advanced years and the rigors of the cryogenic sleep that had extended his existence. More than 250 years old chronologically, the brilliant scientist had been restored to the relatively youthful age of his early forties, thanks to the incredible technology of the Thrush Continuum, wielded by Sam the Imperator. With a touch and an infusion of nanotechnology robots into his physical system, the ravages of age, countless surgeries to replace failing organs with harvested or cybernetic replacements, and the stresses of surviving under the iron rule of the hybrid barons had been erased.
The one thing that hadn’t been returned to “normal” as he’d seen it, was the fact that his eyes were still blue. It was because they had their own genetic code from an unknown donor. The cataracts that had started to develop, however, had been eaten away, nanites transforming the damaged tissues into healthy, vital, young tissues.
If Sam had the power to undo two centuries of aging with a touch, constructing a living man, an exact duplicate with memories and behavior patterns to match the original, wasn’t outside of his capabilities. DNA, blood testing, fingerprinting, all of that would only prove that the Kane they were looking at was biologically human, not a cleverly built android duplicate.
Lakesh turned to Grant. In the darkness, his dark bronzed features looked particularly grim, illuminated by the light filtering through the window. Grant’s brow was wrinkled with the same worries that Brigid had just voiced. Of all the people in the room, though, Grant had known Kane the longest. The two men were as close to brothers as could possibly be without sharing a single parent.
Grant was probably riddled with worry over not being able to tell if his closest friend on the planet had been subverted by a doppelganger. Sure, as they came through the mat-trans chamber, Bry had stated that the three signatures were nonanomalous, but that was merely a machine. Grant had been a Magistrate, and he lived his life dependent on senses and instincts that weren’t susceptible to the whims of electronic failure or alteration of computer code. Being told by Kane that he himself doubted the veracity of his existence had cast the same shadow over Grant’s observational abilities.
“All right, Kane. I’ve checked everything in our medical file on you,” DeFore said. “There are no artificial constructs within your body, except for the Commtact implant on your mastoid. Your retinas and fingerprints are identical. I checked with Brigid, and your hair and beard growth are identical to what they were when you first headed off into the woods. Your bones are normal. Your reflexes are suboptimal, but that’s to be expected with a concussion. Blood chemistry shows no variants from before.”
“What about the contents of my stomach?” Kane asked.
“There aren’t any, but I looked at your throat, and you had vomited earlier today,” DeFore said.
Kane grimaced.
“You got hit on the head hard enough to be knocked out. And you stated that the Thrush duplicate and the Fomorian had taken you captive after rendering you unconscious,” DeFore said. “When you woke up, you puked, emptying your stomach.”
“Yes,” Kane added, annoyed. “You get knocked out, you wake up and vomit. It’s happened enough times to me…I think.”
“What I can tell is that you suffered a mild concussion. Your skull, thick wonder that it is, hasn’t been fractured,” DeFore said. “You’re not a cyborg. You’re not an android. You’re as real as can possibly be.”
Kane touched his forehead, feeling the nylon sutures that had closed up the gash. “Another scar.”
“If there is, I’ll be disappointed,” DeFore told him. “That should heal up nicely.”
Kane looked at the one-way glass, as if trying to see past the mirrored surface on his side and look into the faces of his friends. “So, I’m me. I’m Kane, right?”
“You tell us,” Grant spoke said into the microphone in the observation room.
Lakesh felt his gut tighten at the pronouncement. Yes, they were dealing with a pandimensional being with access to technologies that even the brilliant scientific knowledge amassed at Cerberus couldn’t even dream of. But would Thrush go so far as to make an unwitting duplicate that actively voiced doubts of its own veracity? Or would the fiendish hive mind be so crass and subtle as to engage in a series of obfuscating maneuvers to plant a cunning and savage entity in their midst?
Lakesh’s brilliant mind went over every single iteration of the ruse that had seemingly thrown their friend into such paranoia that he had had himself taken prisoner and subjected to a wide suite of physical, chemical and genetic scans. He tried to apply Occam’s razor to each of these plots, but realized that, given the history of their brutal encounters with Colonel Thrush and his continuum of alternate selves, carving away the improbable was impossible. Which ended up with another potential outcome that the pandimensional menace could have sought. By inserting a poisonous doubt into Cerberus, a doubt affecting the man who, essentially, was the heart of the entire war against the Annunaki overlords and all others who would enslave Earth and humanity, had Thrush taken the wind out of their sails? The android multiverse traveler had just made it so that they couldn’t trust one-third of the triumvirate of heroes who had formed such a confluence that they could accomplish the impossible.
Without that perfect team at the core of Cerberus, savagely undercut by doubt, the whole of the rebellion against Enlil and his kind, and by proxy, all the other superpowers seeking Earth’s domination, had been instantly defanged.
“Friend Kane?” Lakesh asked. “You’re the one who brought this crisis to our attention. What do you feel?”
Kane closed his eyes, concentrating. When he finally opened them, he sighed. “I feel bruises all over my carcass, a splitting headache and I’m getting nauseous from lack of food and drink. Beyond that, it’s anybody’s damn guess.”
Grant studied his friend’s face as he spoke. He turned to the others. “Sounds as authentic as ever to me.”
“No variations from Kane’s normal form of speech,” Brigid added. “Right now, we’ve got one hundred percent verification on retinal and fingerprint analysis, dental records are identical right down to the wear factor and, after forty percent of the data has been analyzed on his genetics, there is not a single variation. Healed scars match photographic record of prior wound recovery, as well, except for the new injuries he picked up in the battle with the Fomorians.”
Kane looked at the mirrored glass separating him from the rest of the leadership of the Cerberus base. “So does that mean I can have a cup of coffee and a pot roast sandwich? Or just crackers and water?”
Grant leaned to the intercom. “Edwards, give Kane his damn lunch before he starves to death.”
The hulking ex-Magistrate under Domi’s command in Cerberus Away Team Beta strode into the operating room carrying a tray. Edwards was almost the same size as Grant, and Lakesh marveled at the rippling power emanating from the ex-Mag as he handed the meal to Kane.
“Edwards,” Domi spoke up, “you couldn’t intimidate the real Kane. You can unclench your muscles now.”
Edwards looked down at Kane, then snorted. “If you’re just a fake, I’ll take your head off.”
Kane rubbed the crown of his head, as touching his forehead would obviously unleash whole new waves of pain. He glanced up to the physical monster in the room with him and sighed. “You know, you’d actually be doing me a favor.”
DeFore put a small cup on the tray before Kane. “You step off the mat-trans all grim and determined not to show an ounce of human weakness, but after a few hours, you’re bitching that I’m not giving you some ibuprofen. If that’s not a sign he’s the real Kane, then I’ll eat my thermometer.”
Lakesh cupped his hand over his mouth. He wanted to tell DeFore not to make promises she might have to keep, but for now, he didn’t want to cause any conflict. He fought down the doubt from his voice and spoke up. “So now what are we going to do regarding the Thrush presence in the Poconos and their mutant assistants?”
“I dropped a mountainside onto them,” Grant said. “So for now, they’ll be off balance. Epona has moved her people to an older settlement before their expansion closer to the valley we hit with the avalanche. It will give the Appalachians some room and leave the Fomorian raiders nothing to attack.”
“Why couldn’t they just stay in the older valley?” Domi asked.
“Pride. The fact that the Fomorians would eventually track them down,” Brigid said. “As well, the hunting and water supplies are plentiful in that area, not exhausted like the area they’d abandoned. Right now, all Epona’s people have only a few days of supplies that they were able to move into the older shelters.”
“We could transport extra stuff to them,” Domi suggested.
“Really? Because we’ve got a redoubt full of people here,” Lakesh interjected. “I’m all for a little bit of charity, but we have our own needs to take care of, and the Appalachians don’t strike me as the type of people to willingly resort to welfare from people they barely trust.”
“It’s a temporary solution,” Grant concluded. “But between Cerberus Away Teams Alpha and Beta, we’ll be able to deal with whatever the Fomorians and Thrush can recover from the avalanche.”
“And if not, we can always request assistance from Shizuka and Aristotle,” Brigid said, mentioning the respective leaders of the Tigers of Heaven in New Edo and the Pantheon operating out of New Olympus. “Between a force of samurai and a squad of gear skeletons, we can hit the Fomorians with a lot of fighting skill and technology.”
Lakesh frowned. “Or give Thrush information about the extent of our allies. He knew about the Tigers of Heaven, we assume, since it was around the time he returned to Earth as the Imperator Sam that we first encountered them. Whether Thrush retains the knowledge of Enlil and the related technology is unknown for now.”
“And who’s to say that Thrush, being a robot himself, really would worry about the relatively primitive combat suits of the Olympians?” Grant asked. “It’d be like throwing a Deathbird after one of Enlil’s scout ships.”
Kane rapped his knuckles on the mirror. Lakesh sighed and turned on the lights in the meeting room, then retracted the one-way glass. “Yes, friend Kane?”
Kane swallowed his mouthful of sandwich. “I’d like to point out that while we know one form of Thrush, native to our planet, became Enlil, I don’t think that they share all the same technology. The Orb is as different from an Annunaki scout ship as you can get. Otherwise, Thrush would be sending his android copies after us in squadrons of craft, and the Orb would be parked in orbit, throwing down as much firepower as Tiamat could have brought to bear.”
Lakesh looked to Brigid for confirmation.
“He’s got a point, and this time it’s not the one at the top of his head,” Brigid said.
Kane winked at her, then chomped another bite out of his pot roast sandwich. DeFore gave him a mock slap on the shoulder.
“This isn’t your personal dining room,” she grumbled.
Kane nodded in agreement and rose to join his colleagues in the meeting room. DeFore handed him the rest of his meal tray, then barked orders for her interns to clean up and sterilize the observation room.
For the moment, things had returned to normal, but Lakesh kept his eye on Kane throughout the strategy meeting.
And from what he could tell about Grant and Brigid, their suspicions remained, hidden just below the surface.
Chapter 5
Grant spied Brigid take Kane out of the side door of the meeting room, and she gave him a quick nod while he was distracted. She was going to do her best to minimize any problems with him, whether he was genuine or fake. Limping and battered from hand-to-hand combat with what appeared to be the product of Tuatha de Danaan mutation technology, the Cerberus staff had a valid reason for sidelining the man who was, by record, reputation and the blood he’d shed, the star player for the human rebels. If anyone deserved a chance to throw himself back into a comfortable bed and get some rest after the battering he’d received, it was Kane.
Brigid, with her close relationship with Kane, took the task of escorting him out of the meeting room and assuring him that this was one crisis that Cerberus could handle without his assistance. Of course, that meant that Grant was going to be the only member of Cerberus Away Team Alpha immediately ready for action. He caught Domi looking mischievously at him.
“CAT Beta is ready to go,” Domi told him.
Lakesh’s forehead wrinkled with the statement. “We’re not even certain that friend Grant’s avalanche was sufficient to cripple the Fomorians and their Thrush liaison.”
“If the liaison is still in that valley,” Grant said, his voice low, as if he were tempting fate.
Lakesh looked toward the hallway, then cleared his throat.
“Come on, Moe,” Domi protested. “We’ll have Grant with us….”
“It just doesn’t seem to have the same confluence of fate that would be available if it were Kane, Brigid and Grant,” Lakesh said. “My apologies for any disrespect.”
Grant shook his head. “None taken.”
“Listen, if Kane is back at the Poconos, then we’re going to have to have people in the area to find him,” Domi said. “And outside of Sky Dog’s people, I’m the best wilderness tracker in this hemisphere.”
“She’s got a point,” Grant said. “And if Kane catches me sitting around Cerberus while we’ve got Thrush and mutant man-eaters running around and working together, he’ll want to get back out into the field.”
“Which could aggravate his injuries, leading to real problems if he’s the real thing,” Lakesh spoke up. “Or if he’s fake, give him the opportunity to return to the Thrush Continuum after accomplishing whichever task he was sent to do.”
“Even if it were just to throw doubt onto one of our own,” Domi added.
“We have to keep Kane here and under wraps for now,” Grant said. “Anything else is just an invitation to disaster. Lakesh, maybe you should start thinking about exactly what Thrush would want to do with the resources we have here at Cerberus that he couldn’t do from his Orb.”
“I’ve been running everything I could in my mind,” Lakesh said.
Grant nodded. “All you need to do is keep an eye on Kane to figure out what he’s trying to do here and put it up against what you’ve suspected.”
“Precisely,” Lakesh answered. “Be careful, darlingest Domi.”
“I’m going to have to say the same thing,” Domi returned. “Edwards, go get Sela. We’re suiting up for the field. Grant, you might—”
“I’m already on the way to the armory to pick up some spare gear for Kane,” Grant cut her off.
“And more restraints,” Domi added. “What we run into might look like Kane, but what if that really is the fake, and we’ve been stuck running around and picking up the infiltrator when we brought the real guy home?”
Grant grimaced. “DeFore, could you spare a couple painkillers for me? All this shit’s giving me a headache.”
“You’re not the only one lost here,” DeFore responded. “But I’m going to give you my educated opinion. I’ve been over that man easily forty times in the past. If he’s a duplicate, then whoever kidnapped the real Kane stripped him naked and looked over every inch of his body, then utilized some pretty impressive technology to copy every bit of scar tissue around.”
“That’s not saying much,” Lakesh returned. “Sam regressed my age. Remolding a patch of skin to look like healed tissue shouldn’t be beyond that level of biological engineering.”
“Or we could just be too damn paranoid for our own good,” Grant said. “Domi, did you get anything wrong about him?”
Domi shook her head. “It’s not as if I have the sense of smell of a dog or shit like that. I’m a good tracker, but the only superhuman ability I have are the soles of my feet. They’re harder than armadillo shells.”
Grant shrugged. “I just thought you’d spot something the rest of us didn’t think of. You’ve proved to be pretty perceptive on more than enough occasions.”
Domi sighed. “Sorry. I’m not thinking straight.”
“Which I believe could be Thrush’s plan,” Lakesh said.
“Whatever the plan, the more time we spend jawing about this shit, the closer it comes to succeeding,” Grant growled. “Come on, Domi.”
The pair was as physically different as could be, one tall, muscular and seemingly cast out of bronze and obsidian, the other small, wiry and looking as if she were crafted from porcelain. Yet the two people shared an identical intensity and determination as they left the meeting room.
BRIGID ACCOMPANIED Kane to the canteen, where he finished his meal. She watched as Kane threw away the remaining trash from his lunch. He sighed and picked up his plate and utensils, carrying them to the washing basin. “I know, don’t make more work for the kitchen staff. You’d think with all the extra bodies around, we’d need something to keep them busy.”
Brigid raised an eyebrow. “You mean that digging through the garbage for your fork and knife is a good utilization of some of the most brilliant minds left over from the twentieth century?”
Kane shrugged. “Look at the world they left behind for us. All that genius and…”
“You’re putting the blame for skydark on them?” Brigid asked. “Especially when we saw Colonel Thrush himself pull the trigger that blew up the Russian embassy?”
Kane shook his head and grimaced. “Thrush took advantage of the tensions those big brains created. I’m not absolving that freak. He’s the one who jumped me and set a bunch of Fomorian mutants on my ass. Right now, I’m just realizing how antisocial I feel with all these people crowding around.”
Brigid took a deep breath and nodded. As compassionate as Kane was toward the plight of others, ever since the Manitius personnel had been evacuated and relocated to Cerberus redoubt, privacy and peace and quiet had been curtailed. Beset with a pounding headache, and not at the top of his physical condition, his impatience couldn’t be cast aside by strolling off into the surrounding hills and spending time in the relative tranquility of Sky Dog’s village. Brigid had often joked that she’d keep an eye out for little Indian papooses with blue eyes, but the truth of the matter was, Kane was much like Domi in that they were at home in the wilderness. The trappings of the redoubt were cold and sterile, no matter how brightly lit or colorfully painted. With the addition of more people, Brigid could see that Kane’s momentary musings were not an endorsement of Thrush’s destruction of humanity.
Still, Kane winced internally. “I’m not doing much for my case by being so misanthropic.”
Brigid shook her head. “I’ll bring you some coffee. We’ll start over.”
Kane rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t overlook that kind of a rant if I were you.”
Brigid rested her hand on his shoulder. “Why? It is a sentiment you’d voice if you were too hurt and too tired to get back into the fresh air. In fact, I’d be afraid if you didn’t let some of your rough edges show. As much as we get called heroes, we’re still just normal people who are allowed to be grumpy and hold some loathing for others.”
Kane took a deep breath. “Maybe…but you don’t have to disguise the fact that you’re babysitting me because I haven’t been officially cleared.”
Brigid nodded. “Find us a table, okay?”
“Sure,” Kane relented.
Brigid cursed herself for being too quick to disregard Kane’s rant, but that was an emotional reaction. She went over the pure logic of the situation and she stood on her decision. Everything she knew about the man pointed to someone who’d make a glib statement, a joking condemnation. Throw in the effects of physical trauma he’d experienced, including one tortuous bit of combat that occurred before her eyes, and she really had nothing to flag in Kane’s behavior or speech.
She prepared their coffee mechanically while her intellect threw up a flow chart of possibilities in her mind’s eye. The benefits of having a photographic memory allowed her to visualize a thousand different things at once. In one part of the flow chart, she ran before and after imagery of Kane from multiple angles, looking for details that didn’t quite match. Nothing showed up, which frustrated her. On another part of the flow chart, she remembered the details of the Thrush Continuum’s transdimensional Orb ship. The great ark was staffed by copies of Thrush from across a multitude of universes, though they all bore only minor variations of appearance.
Brigid brought up her memories of the young boy into whom Thrush had implanted his mind. The child had been birthed by Erica van Sloan, and had seemed entirely human, except for an intellect that dwarfed anything Brigid had ever seen, and access to technologies such as the Heart of the World and the nanomachines that rebuilt Lakesh so adeptly. She concentrated on young Sam’s face, processing its similarities to the more adult versions of Colonel Thrush. Thanks to her eidetic mental imagery, she was able to compare facial bone structure, eyes, jaw profile and ears. She ran those pictures through her mind’s eye and sighed in disgust. If she hadn’t recognized the boy Sam as a younger version of Thrush with her infallible memory, then why would she be able to pick up such alterations and similarities now?
“Because you’re being thorough,” Brigid whispered to herself.
“Thorough about what?” a familiar voice asked. A scientist from the Manitius base stood by the table that Kane had selected. Daryl Morganstern gave a small wave to her. “Hi, Brigid. I wasn’t expecting you guys back so soon.”
Brigid’s cheeks burned. “Well, you can see Kane took a knock to the head, so we’re letting him recuperate before we go running back into the field.”
Morganstern nodded.
“I know that he’s from the moon base, but I for one can’t place this guy,” Kane said.
Brigid sighed. “That’s because I hadn’t introduced you two yet.”
“Introduced us?” Kane asked.
Morganstern shrugged. “Well…we’re sort of dating.”
Kane shot a glance toward Brigid. “Dating?”
Brigid set down the coffee cups. “Have a seat, Daryl.”
“Thanks,” Morganstern replied. He sat next to Brigid but turned his chair to avoid eye contact with Kane. He’d lowered his head, hunching his shoulders in a turtlelike defensive posture.
“Straighten up, Daryl. I’m not going to bite your head off,” Kane said. “Dating?”
Brigid rolled her eyes. “Listen, I’m not sure if you can remember past that head trauma, but just because you seem to have been happy to learn from Sindri that we’re married in some alternate future, I’m not buying it.”
Kane took his cup of coffee and took a sip. “We undid that timeline, didn’t we?”
Brigid nodded. “And aren’t you the one who’s always fighting fate?”
Kane lifted a hand to hold off Brigid. “Hang on, Baptiste. I’m not complaining. I just didn’t realize that you’d found someone worth dating from Manitius.”
Brigid didn’t have to look back at Morganstern, who had put a hand up to his eyes to hide his wince. The lunar scientist was a theoretical mathematician and part of a new team that Lakesh had assembled to rework the quantum equations to further enhance and refine the interphaser and mat-trans system. He was also another person who had been gifted with a near perfect memory, and while Brigid was helping out with Lakesh’s interphaser program, they had started talking. Physically, Morganstern was average, and his eyes and hair were a plain brown, though he had a sweet smile and dimples. Still, the pair had developed a rapport.
“There are quite a few nice people who came down to Cerberus,” Brigid stated. “Plus, he’s been a great chess opponent.”
“I’ve played chess with you,” Kane said, sounding almost hurt.
“We don’t need the board,” Morganstern said, voice low and brittle. He looked at Brigid. “Oh. I have you in check on board two.”
Brigid nodded. “Game five, though, I’ll mate in six moves.”
Morganstern winced. “I was hoping you hadn’t taken queen’s pawn into that equation….”
Kane gave a low whistle. “Okay, maybe I haven’t played chess with you that well. How many games do you have going?”
“We’ve tied and drawn so many times, we’ve expanded it to seven concurrent games,” Morganstern admitted.
“And how many moves until mate?” Kane asked.
Brigid glared at Kane. “Excuse me?”
Morganstern flinched at the flare of anger on Brigid’s part. “I don’t—”
“Oh, I know what he meant,” Brigid replied.
“You bust my chops over little blue-eyed Indian babies,” Kane said.
“That doesn’t mean you can be a prick and put poor Daryl on the spot,” Brigid said.
Morganstern swallowed. “I think I’ll go get myself a soft drink.”
“I’m not letting Kane drive you off,” Brigid said. She narrowed her gaze at the man as he took another sip of coffee. “That’s why I didn’t introduce you—because I knew you’d be a pig.”
“Really, Brigid. I’m just thirsty,” Morganstern said, his voice rising an octave with obvious nervousness. “I’ll be right back.”
Brigid puffed out her cheeks. “You’ve got a minute.”
Morganstern nodded, a little too rapidly to be anything but on edge. He scurried out of his chair and headed toward the drink station.
“I’m sorry, Baptiste,” Kane said. “He’s an okay-seeming guy.”
“Yeah,” Brigid grumbled. “It’s nothing big for you, Mister Hero-man, to lay a slick line on one of those barbarian trollops you encounter on days ending with the letter y, but it’s not easy for women. He told me there’s a dozen moon base scientists who are afraid to talk to me because I’m out of their league.”
“You are,” Kane admitted. “Guys are intimidated by pretty girls,” Kane continued. “Throw in the fact that you’re a resident superheroine, able to walk across dimensions by concentrating on funky rugs and regularly prance about in skintight uniforms…”
Brigid grimaced.
“I’m not going to rain on your parade,” Kane said.
Brigid squeezed her eyebrows. “Just drop it, Kane.”
“Consider it dropped,” he answered. “Besides, what’s that you called us once upon a time?”
“Anam-chara,” Brigid said. “Soul friends. That’s if I buy into that jump-dream memory you had of rescuing one of my other incarnations. We’re bound together, but nothing you’ve told me says that we’re some kind of cosmic lovers. Good grief, I’m trying to apply logic to reincarnation.”
“Enlil reincarnated. Fand and Epona recognize my old soul,” Kane offered.
“Where’s Daryl with his soda?” Brigid muttered.
“The nozzle popped on his soft drink,” Kane said. “He and a couple of the other members of the geek squad have the dispenser disassembled and are arguing over how best to rebuild it.”
Brigid looked over her shoulder and saw Morganstern. The young scientist shrugged, looking pained at the brown, soaking stain on his chest. Brigid gave him a smile that she wasn’t particularly feeling at the moment, and he waved at her before walking toward the table.
“Sorry. It looks like we’ve got our emergency to counterpoint whatever crisis you’re dealing with,” Morganstern told her.
“Who says we’re in the middle of a crisis?” Brigid asked.
“Kane’s injured, and CAT Beta is preparing for a jump back to the Poconos,” Morganstern noted. “Grant’s going with them.”
Kane nodded. “I know. I hate being sidelined, but DeFore told me I have a concussion.”
Brigid sighed. “I’m sorry, Daryl.”
“That’s all right. We still have our date scheduled for tomorrow night. Running into you and Kane was an unexpected surprise for the day,” Morganstern offered.
Kane nodded toward the soft drink machine. “It looks like one of your buddies is upset.”
Morganstern looked back, horrified. “Wynan! No, we are not going to waste valuable platinum on diet soda! I’m sorry, Brigid.”
She reached up and grabbed Morganstern’s shirt, kissing him on the cheek. “Thanks for understanding, Daryl.”
Morganstern chuckled nervously, his dimpled smile glowing beneath blushing cheeks. “Brigid, I want to thank you.”
Brigid turned back and saw the smirk on Kane’s face. “You say another word, and I will peel the flesh from your bones and tell everyone that I was certain you are a death pod person from Dimension Fifteen. And they’d never blame me.”
Kane covered his mouth to hold back his laughter. Brigid hoped that in her mock rage, she hadn’t given form to a dangerous prophecy. The man’s stifled amusement seemed to echo in a haunting taunt to her doubts.
Chapter 6
As Grant went over the gear stuffed into the pouches of his web utility belt, Domi remained silent. The two had come a long way since their first meeting in the Tartarus Pits of Cobaltville. Originally Domi had fallen deeply for the dark ex-Mag because he was the first person ever to show genuine concern and affection for her. Since then, both had found the true loves of their lives, and their relationship had matured. Domi herself had matured, and the love she felt for Grant wasn’t something that was based on sexual attraction.
If anything, Grant was a nurturing father figure that she had grown up without, which was why Grant had felt so uncomfortable with her fleeting advances, and then her campaign to scandalize and make him jealous. More than once, she had wanted to apologize for giving him such an awkward time, but Grant wouldn’t hear anything about it. They had both found partners, and now with that stumbling block out of the way, Grant no longer felt aloof toward her.
They could have these comfortable silences together. Though Domi could see a million questions and doubts storming through his mind, Grant focused on preparing for the mission back to the mountain range. It was enough that Domi was there, and though her vocabulary had grown greatly since her arrival at Cerberus, her silence spoke more deeply than anything else. Grant strapped his Sin Eater onto his forearm last of all, and he tested the holster mechanism. A quick whirr and the machine pistol snapped into his palm, then withdrew.
He looked at Domi who was ready for action. Her big, ruby-red eyes, startling globes of crimson, searched his face.
“If that’s the wrong Kane, we’ll find the right one,” Domi said softly.
Grant nodded. “He’s lucky like that. To have us come in as the cavalry and rescue his sorry ass.”
“He’s done it for us enough times.”
Grant took a deep breath and slid a Kevlar-lined load-bearing vest over his shadow suit top. The photocell camouflage of the remarkable uniform wouldn’t be needed, and Grant wanted plenty of pockets and some extra armor to augment the protective abilities of his uniform. The vest’s bullet-resistant fabric was reinforced with lightweight ceramic trauma plates. He’d heard the kind of firepower that the Fomorians were packing, and the AK-47 fired a notoriously difficult round to resist with conventional body armor. “’Course, it would be like him…”
“Shut up,” Domi whispered.
Grant’s eyes flashed with annoyance, but he remained silent. It may have been silly superstition on Domi’s part, but she was not the kind of woman to tempt fate by talking about the worst that could happen. The loss of Kane from Cerberus would be a crippling blow on so many levels. It was his courage and compassion that had redirected and refocused the fight against the barons after Lakesh’s years of quiet, desperate machinations. Kane had forged the bond with the local Native American tribe, and had been instrumental in rescuing societies from corruption. He’d saved everyone’s life a dozen times over.
Domi remembered how Kane had, in a moment of desperation, plucked her from the brink of annihilation with the technology of Thunder Isle. It had been during a fierce battle to escape Area 51. Domi had helped Kane escape a forced breeding program where he sired a new generation of children with superior genetics and all of Kane’s phenomenal physical and mental attributes. In the battle to break loose, Domi had been trapped in the path of an implode grenade, a powerful weapon that by all rights should have turned her into a smear of plasma.
Instead, Kane had discovered the Thunder Isle temporal matrix. He pushed the staff to lock on to her position at the moment just before the grenade’s detonation. In Domi’s mind, she had simply blinked, leaving behind the underground complex and appearing in the time scoop. She’d lived simply because Kane had not given up, because his supersharp perceptions noticed that her supposed death was not how it should have been from a grenade detonation. His faith, his willingness to defy the laws of physics and consequence enabled Kane to wrench her from the jaws of death.
That same undying loyalty had been the impetus to save others. Kane would never think that someone was dead and lost. He’d fight with the Grim Reaper himself to protect those he loved. Without him, the glue that united Cerberus would dry, crack and come apart in a spray of brittle crumbs. Domi would never admit to any possibility that Kane was dead, and she wouldn’t allow others to even breathe that doubt into existence.
It was stubborn and superstitious, but Kane had been too bullheaded to allow Domi to be murdered.
Grant swallowed hard and recovered his ability to speak, but this time, he skirted the issue. “You might want to take some extra equipment.”
Domi patted her crossbow, a large steel one with a reel crank on the side. It was an upgrade of the small pistol bow model she often carried. “Shot through tree trunk with this.”
Domi blushed as she realized that she’d dropped back into her abbreviated outlanders speech. Grant smiled, then pretended that he couldn’t detect the nerves made all too obvious when she spoke.
“This crossbow’s rated at 416 feet per second for a bolt,” she said, fighting down her clipped verbosity. “And the crank allows for fast reloads.”
“But it’s not going to be ideal if a Fomorian comes into close combat,” Grant said. “I’m not so much worried about me or Edwards—we’re as big as they are.”
“I know,” Domi said. “But I’ve got my Detonics .45.” She patted the small pistol on her hip. “There’s a MAC-10 in my bag, too.”
“I hope that’s enough.” Grant sighed. His mind had already let go of the logistical issues of their upcoming trip and had returned to his best friend. It had been a feeble effort, trying to distract Grant from his true fears by delving into the musketry necessary to bring down Bres’s mutants. Still, it was a moment or two where he had been distracted from worries.
Domi took Grant by the hand and gave him a quiet, loving embrace. Her slender arms squeezed around his shoulders with far more strength than they would have appeared to, and Grant responded with a gentle tap on her back.
“Go get the rest of your team,” Grant said. “I want to make one last check with Brigid and him.”
Even as she left him alone in the locker room to check on the status of her CAT Beta Team, Domi noted that Grant couldn’t bring himself to say his friend’s name. Though she remained skeptical of “supernatural” abilities, she’d survived in the Outlands and the slums of Cobaltville utilizing instincts that couldn’t readily be defined. Grant’s instincts refused to allow him to call the man everyone recognized as Kane by that name. The bonds of friendship were strong, and they ran deeper than simple blood chemistry and genetics. There was a hint of falseness, an imperceptible doubt that shouldn’t exist after retinal scans and fingerprint matching.
Domi hated that her own hunter’s senses didn’t pick up anything worthwhile, except that she could tell that Grant didn’t quite trust the version of Kane they carried back through the mat-trans. Whatever the menace Thrush had placed within their ranks, it was something that had been an absolutely perfect duplicate, right down to healed scars and a jawbone implant to attach a Commtact. The similarities were so fine that even Brigid Baptiste’s eidetic memory couldn’t find enough incongruity to give more than a vague doubt on her own.
The balance of the three Cerberus heroes had been altered, and they weren’t certain if it was due to head trauma. Brigid herself had suffered a skull injury before and had taken a while to recover. For a brief period, the three people weren’t at their top game on missions, part of what had inspired Lakesh to form a second Cerberus away team to take up the slack. Domi had done her best to emulate the kind of team formed by her friends, but Kane, Grant and Brigid were a magical combination, a one-in-a-million act of emotional and mental chemistry that went far beyond the sum of intellect and raw muscle. Lakesh had pointed out many times before that their union as a team allowed them to defy the laws of probability and defeat threats that loomed so large, they could swallow the entire solar system.
Domi simply had to rely on skill, knowledge and well-applied brute force for CAT Beta. It had carried them through a few missions, and they’d even been able to contain the rage of a technogoddess gone mad before she utilized an ancient Threshhold device to teleport her from a stony tomb in which she’d trapped the bitch. Even then, though, they’d had Brigid Baptiste’s aid while Kane and Grant battled a rival god and his army.
Together or apart, the three of them in coordination had been a focused force, and any goal they sought to achieve usually ended in victory. Bittersweet ashes from a Pyrrhic win were rare; for the most part, a win was a win.
She didn’t want to think of the torment and horrors that would lie ahead if the three heroes of Cerberus were ever to split up. Kane liked to point out that the core of the human resistance was formed by everyone’s free will, an indomitable spirit. He’d even brought out the old American flag to wave as a banner in the face of the Annunaki when Enlil sent his forces for the first open warfare that had broken out after Tiamat’s return to Earth. The cloth had meant much to the people of the moon base, but Domi’s loyalty wasn’t to a striped piece of fabric. She’d bled and wept with Kane and his allies. They were family. And with family came a fealty that couldn’t be broken.
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James Axler
Earth remains the volatile prize of aeons of war and domination by two panterrestrial races. Returning the fight to these inhuman overlords, the Cerberus rebels are the champions of the planet's postapocalyptic dark ages.They spark a uniquely human resilience and courage to stand down the forces of infinitely powerful, perhaps unstoppable entities in the ongoing war to retake Earth for humanity. The Bluegrass range, ripe with secrets and magic, hides the operating base of a race of monstrous genetic mutations, faithful servants of an ancient overlord. As Kane and the rebels stage their reconnaissance, the shocking new face of an old nemesis enters the fray. As this crossspatial cyborg replicates himself as Kane and breaches humanity's last defense, he may well succeed in wiping the mountains–and their inhabitants–off the face of Earth permanently.
Kane couldn’t shake the feeling of familiarity in the enemy’s voice
“I’m not here to kill you. I don’t even want to seriously hurt you, because my real contention is with the errant young Sam.”
“He likes to call himself Enlil, now,” Kane corrected. He struggled to focus his eyes, but the shove of a warm, human-feeling hand left him swinging. “You want Enlil, so you do what…lure us out here to hang us up like beef?”
“The enemy of my enemy is…”
“Let me see your damn face!” Kane growled.
“Touchy, touchy,” the Thrush-thing replied. He stepped back and, finally, Kane’s vision was clear enough and focused enough for him to see that the metallic-toned voice had come from his own face. Hard, predator-sharp blue eyes glinted to match the cruel smile on the doppelganger Kane’s lips. It was identical to him, right down to the amount of scruffy beard growth on his jaw and the faint remnant of a scar on his cheek.
Reality Echo
Outlanders
James Axler
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!
—Jean Jacques Rousseau
1712–1778
On the Inequality among Mankind
The deadliest weapon I’ve ever seen used is a lie. It can crumble nations and slay hundreds without effort. Only knowledge and truth can dispel a lie’s wrongs, yet it is a battle to spread the facts, and no truth can revive those who have fallen.
—Brigid Baptiste, scholar and warrior
The Road to Outlands—
From Secret Government Files to the Future
Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.
Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.
What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.
Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.
In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.
Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.
But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?
Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.
Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.
For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.
After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.
With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 1
Sitting on the rock, his long legs drawn up to his chest, Grant’s hulking frame bore a passing resemblance to a large gargoyle carved from jet-black obsidian. Though Grant was silent, Brigid Baptiste could tell that the ex-Magistrate was on edge. Too often, opponents of the Cerberus warriors had mistaken the phenomenal power of the massive man’s limbs for a lack of intelligence, underestimating him at their own peril.
As a Magistrate in Cobaltville, one of the fortified baronies that rose from the wastelands of postapocalyptic America, Grant and his partner, Kane, developed the resourcefulness to deal with nearly any crisis. Grant also honed a set of observational skills that complemented Brigid’s keen intellect and Kane’s nearly preternatural instincts. That sharp mind had also made the big warrior one of the best pilots that Brigid had ever seen, adept at flying all manner of aircraft and capable of getting a damaged ship up and running with a minimum of tools.
The turmoil presently consuming Grant stemmed from the fact that Kane had been sent off on a solo quest to satisfy the Appalachian witch Epona and her cadre of mountain scouts. Grant had been opposed to such a handicap situation, but Kane conceded for the sake of diplomacy.
“Damn fool,” Grant’s deep voice grumbled, startling Brigid from her reverie.
“He can handle himself,” Brigid argued.
Grant’s dark eyes swiveled. The glare of momentary annoyance faded as he regarded her in his peripheral vision. “We all can. But I can still say this situation sucks.”
Brigid nodded in agreement. She turned back toward where Granny Epona sat with her protective cordon of mountain folk. The term “Granny” was a misnomer, as the water witch had the body of a woman in her twenties, lean and tight corded muscles beneath her protective furs and leathers. Her face, windburned to a deep tan by the cold mountaintop winds of this stretch of the Poconos in what used to be known as Pennsylvania, was relatively unlined, making any determination of her age difficult, though Brigid guessed that the woman was between forty and sixty. A breeze plucked at Epona’s black hair, tugging it aside like a curtain so that Brigid was able to see the water witch in profile.
This was the second time that Brigid had met the woman. Their first meeting was when Brigid, Kane and Grant had arrived via interphaser to negotiate for the release of a small team of Cerberus explorers who had stumbled upon the mountain folk. Initially Epona and her people had been suspicious of outlanders, but their fear of outside interference was tempered by enough reason that the Appalachians didn’t execute them on the spot. It was a reprieve from the usual first contact that the three outlanders encountered, one of cold peace, both sides afraid to trust each other but too smart to make the first hostile move. Something had changed about Epona since then, and the flame-haired former archivist couldn’t quite place it. Given her observational skills and eidetic memory, the incongruence nibbled at her, but there was nothing concrete to quantify her suspicions.
Epona looked up, as if she had noticed the attention locked on to her. “Has Kane appeared at the tree line?”
“No,” Brigid answered.
Grant’s lips curled in a sneer, but he kept his voice low so only Brigid could hear him. “You know, with our Commtacts, those primitive screwheads wouldn’t hear Kane even if he did turn his on.”
Brigid sighed and fingered the Commtact attached to her jaw. The tiny unit was a two-part man-machine interface developed by Cerberus techs with the help of the scientists of Manitius. The little comm unit worn on the outside hooked up to implanted steel pintels and allowed Brigid to communicate with her partners, as well as keep in touch across the globe with the Cerberus redoubt, which served as their home. Thanks to a series of satellites controlled from the redoubt’s depths, the Commtact signal was strong and clear almost anywhere on the face of the Earth.
The insert implanted on her mandible was voice activated and utilized vibrations in the bone mass to allow her to hear without anyone else listening in. She could also speak so softly that someone only a few feet away wouldn’t hear, but her jaw would transmit the sound to the Commtact in a way that it would be clear and audible to anyone with a proper receiving unit. More than once, since the addition of the Commtact to their regular gear, Brigid and her allies had been able to covertly communicate with one another, even under all but the closest scrutiny.
“I’m going to have to teach that boy to turn his Commtact on,” Grant said.
“That would be breaking the spirit of our deal, stranger,” Epona answered.
Brigid whirled, surprised at the silence with which the witch woman had moved, but only momentarily. Epona traveled with mountain scouts who were as stealthy a group of hunters as Brigid had ever seen, rivaling even Sky Dog’s tribe.
Epona continued after both Cerberus explorers took note of her presence. “Would you rather your friend dishonor your people by being a liar?”
Grant’s eyes narrowed. “It’s funny you should mention honor, witch. Where I come from, it’s considered an affront to let your friend walk into a fucking trap just because you want to impress the natives. Something about loyalty and concern for those who’ve watched out for you. Know anything about that?”
Brigid bit her upper lip, both to kill the smile that threatened to cross her face and to bite back an apology for her friend’s rudeness. Sometimes Grant forgot the adage that you could draw more flies with honey than vinegar, but that was the big ex-Magistrate’s way. Kane had often joked that Grant wasn’t happy unless he was complaining about how miserable he was.
Epona smirked. “Your loyalty does your friend honor. Just remember, we are the ones who invited you here. And I am the lawmaker of my people.”
Grant rolled his eyes and turned his attention to Brigid. “She must be confusing us with some other group of travelers.”
Brigid smiled. “Behave, Grant.”
Grant managed a grin. “Where’s the joy in that?”
He settled back down, staring toward the tree line.
The rules of this particular engagement were simple. In order to open up diplomatic channels between the Appalachians and the Cerberus redoubt, Kane had to go into the forest of this particular valley. Hidden among the trees lurked a race of genetic mutations that had taken to calling themselves the Fomorians, claiming to be the descendants of the beings who menaced the Tuatha de Danaan.
Nothing in Brigid’s studies of the interactions of the panterrestrial entities she knew as the Tuatha de Danaan suggested that the Fomorians were anything but Annunaki, whose roles in the history of humanity had been misinterpreted after years of permutations of the original stories. Brigid was aware that according to the creation legends of the Celts, the Fomorians were allegedly the predecessors of the more human-centric god entities, a parallel tale to the relations between the Hellenic pantheon of Olympian gods and their forebears, the Titans. According to information that Brigid had gleaned from various sources, the Tuatha de Danaan and the Annunaki had warred terribly, thus giving her the impression that those recorded as the malformed and misshapen Fomorians were actually Annunaki, or rather, one of their servant races, which were currently known as the Nephilhim.
Only after the two godlike races had come to peace, and chose to create a supervisory hybrid race known as the Archons, did they fade from the forefront of interaction with humanity. The Archons had been crossbreeds, possessing genetic material of both great races, as well as the stuff of human DNA in them, serving as a bridge between the three species. The hybrid creatures had been charged with retarding human potential, keeping humankind from growing too powerful, lest they grow strong enough to resist the panterrestrial overlords as they slept or lived out their retirement in other dimensions.
Brigid decided to throw a few questions at Epona, as long as she was present. The mystery of what the Fomorians actually were had weighed too much for her to keep her tongue still.
“Your enemies claim to be actual descendants of the Fomorians of Celtic myth?” she asked the Appalachian headwoman.
Epona glanced sidelong at Brigid, as if weighing her response. “You doubt our assertion?”
Brigid shook her head. “I’m just trying to fit this in to what we know about the Tuatha de Danaan.”
“Our forebears,” Epona stated.
Brigid’s brow wrinkled. According to what she knew about Appalachian granny magic in the wake of the Cerberus explorers’ first encounter with Epona and her people, the arts of magic they used were supposedly imported with the Scottish and Irish immigrants who had first arrived on American shores back in the late 1700s. Given the region that they had originated in, it was likely that the isolated and secretive water witches and witch doctors who practiced the arts had links extending back to the Tuatha de Danaan. The only thing that stuck awkwardly in Brigid’s evaluation of Epona’s veracity was that the practitioners of granny magic tended to locate farther south than the Pennsylvanian Poconos, the original territory stretching from the Virginias down to Georgia, where the remote location of their territories allowed the immigrants to retain the ancient Irish and Scottish songs, dances and recipes far more easily than their island predecessors who were dragged into modern society by being made part of Great Britain.
“You seem doubtful of my story. Is it because we’re not in our traditional homelands?” Epona asked.
“That’s part of it,” Brigid said.
Epona smiled. “We migrated in the wake of the great war. Rather than displace people in valleys that weren’t affected by the nuclear bombs, we wandered until we finally settled here. However, if you wish to check our genealogy, we first originated in Georgia. I assume you explorers have traveled there.”
Brigid nodded. “Radioactive fallout zones in Georgia would have forced a migration to more hospitable climes. But what about the Fomorians?”
“The Fomorian warriors who hound the mountain folk were often like us. It was the touch of Bres the Beautiful that awoke the true power within those we thought were merely men,” Epona explained.
Brigid’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t particularly like the reverence that tinged the Appalachian woman’s words. When Epona’s gaze focused on the worry in her features, Brigid pressed on. “Bres the Beautiful, who was the son of Balor, the leader of the Fomorians, correct? He’s still alive after all these millennia?”
Epona smiled unnervingly. “You came to us seeking information on whether Enlil, one of the Sumerian gods, was using one of the many valleys in the Appalachians as a potential hideout. An Annunaki can live for thousands of years, but a son of the beings who fathered the Tuatha de Danaan cannot?”
“In our defense, Enlil and his kin were stored inside of the genetic codes of their descendants until they could be awakened by a signal from their great ship Tiamat,” Brigid said. “They hadn’t been awake the whole time. However, we have encountered another Tuatha, the being known as Maccan.”
“Aengus,” Epona corrected. “His true name is Aengus, son of Dagda, high king of the Tuatha de Danaan and Boann.”
A smile crossed Epona’s lips. Brigid anticipated the source of the granny witch’s humor as her studies of the Tuatha de Danaan sprang to the forefront of her infallible memory. “Boann, who has among her other identities the goddess Brigid.”
Epona nodded knowingly. “It is good to speak with an outsider who knows of our faith.”
Brigid returned the smile. “It’s more a case of occupational necessity. The figures you worship are still alive and well in some form or another. They and their Annunaki counterparts are precisely the reason why making an alliance with you is so vital.”
“Even with the aid of every mountain scout among my people, the Appalachians stretch for thousands of miles. We have not been able to locate the heart of the Fomorian base of operations—what makes you think we would be any more useful in ascertaining whether Enlil and his kin have taken refuge in one of our valleys?” Epona asked.
“Because at least you are a set of eyes and ears in this area. Indeed, you contacted us simply because the Fomorians seemed to be increasing their intelligence and the quality of their equipment,” Brigid pointed out. “Otherwise, you would not have made use of the radio we left behind for you.”
“Well played, Brigid,” Epona said. “There are some things we are not capable of handling. The Fomorians were balanced against us because we at least had the advantage of homemade rifles crafted by our gunsmiths while they relied more upon their brute strength and natural endurance. However, things have shifted.”
Brigid glanced at one of the mountain scouts. The man sat on a rock, a five-foot-long rifle resting between his knees. Though she was not one who took much interest in the minutiae of musketry, it didn’t take a firearm fanatic to realize the quality and art involved in the production of the long weapon, nor was it any surprise that the rifle’s bore was designed to fire cartridges that were meant for more than any normal person. Externally, the arms that the scouts carried were hand-carved wood and steel, the wooden furniture painted and adorned with runes to bless them. The steel barrels were set into heavy firing mechanisms, single-shot bolt action by their appearance, and there was no mistaking the half-inch cavernous hole at the end of the long tube. Taking the opportunity to get a closer look at one of the long brass fangs that were stuffed into a belt loop around the scout’s waist, she recognized the .50-caliber cartridge that was the same type that Grant used for one of his favorite weapons, the M-85 Barrett.
The fact that the scouts chose this as their primary rifle caliber when it was likely that they would encounter their hated enemies meant that the Fomorians were not simply deformed humans, but creatures of phenomenal strength.
“You said that Kane would recognize them when he saw them,” Brigid said. “Unfortunately, I don’t recall any past lives as he does. How did you, er, recognize him?”
Epona chuckled. “I would be a poor water witch if I could not identify the modern embodiment of Cuchulainn.”
Brigid’s lip curled at the mention of that name. It was what Fand, the half Tuatha de Danaan and half Annunaki daughter of Enlil, had insisted on calling Kane. She claimed that he was her destined lover, reborn in order to reunite with her. Though Brigid’s affection for Kane wasn’t of a lustful nature, the thought of Fand sinking her claws into Kane was repulsive. He wasn’t particularly interested in the long-lived demigoddess himself, a surprise considering that Fand was a statuesque being who could have been a Greek sculpture come to life.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got some kind of link to Cuchulainn,” Brigid spoke up.
“No, but you can’t begrudge me a girlish crush on such a hero, can you?” Epona asked.
Brigid clenched her eyes shut. She finally opened one eye, glancing out of the corner toward Grant, whose face was split with a broad smile.
“You’d think Kane was some kind of immature wish-fulfillment fantasy, all the women he gets,” Brigid complained.
“Maybe this time you’ll get some interest,” Grant said.
Brigid raised an eyebrow. “As good-looking as Bres the Beautiful sounds, I don’t think I want to be genetically manipulated to become a Fomorian. From what I’ve heard, my options are missing limbs, missing eyes or the head of a goat.”
Epona studied Brigid for a moment. “You would not be changed. There is nothing of the blood in you.”
“Your granny-witch sight, lady?” Grant asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I can see Cuchulainn in your friend. I can see Fomorian tendencies, or the lack of, in you two,” Epona said. “Do not fear, large one.”
Grant waved her off dismissively. “Whatever.”
Something crackled in the distance, and Brigid’s and Grant’s ears instantly picked it up as the sound of gunfire.
“Kane?” Brigid asked as the Sin Eater snapped into Grant’s grasp.
Chapter 2
When the crackle of gunfire cut through the quiet mountain air, Grant sprung to his full height, his Sin Eater deploying instantly, launched by a flex of his forearm muscles. The microelectric motors attached to the machine pistol’s holster allowed the weapon to be readied instantly, but the demanding weapon required six months of training before a Magistrate could be trusted with a loaded Sin Eater. Grant kept his trigger finger straight as the gun unfolded, grip deposited right into his grasp. Had the digit remained crooked, then the weapon would have launched a 240-grain specially loaded 9 mm bullet, a powerhouse round designed to penetrate the most durable of body armor, even the cockpit of a Deathbird assault helicopter.
To Brigid Baptiste’s credit, the woman had pulled her TP-9 pistol and was ready a heartbeat later. Grant wondered how the beautiful, flame-haired former archivist would take his amazement at how she went from a quiet, bespectacled academic to a confident, adventure-hardened explorer of a hostile world. She had never settled into the overly macho, paramilitary mind-set that had surrounded Grant and Kane in the barracks while they were still Cobaltville Mags, but despite that, she’d forged herself into a warrior. She didn’t rely on false pride and bravado rather than genuine courage to face barbaric or powerful opponents.
Indeed, Grant often wondered at the quality of the Magistrate corps had not the hybrid barons not segregated the ville societies and allowed women to be part of the armored warrior caste that formed the core of their power. That thought evaporated as soon as it struck the light of his logic. The barons had been corrupt, and their sexist segregation had been designed to keep humankind on its knees. To combine both strength and intellect in a person, and to break the limiting bonds of a caste hierarchy, would have made humans less likely to assent to being slaves of a little seen, secretive society of hybrid beings. Grant had only one name, as did Kane and all the other Magistrates, a move calculated to strip the black-armored warriors of any individual identity. It was exceedingly rare for Magistrates to develop intense bonds of friendship and loyalty to anything other than the barons, which was probably why the two partners had so readily slipped the bonds of their orders.
Kane made Grant a little more human, and the reverse was true. That little touch of compassion, a link to another person, had given them both the strength to see the corruption of the villes and break loose. Brigid had been part of that process, as well, giving Kane another anchor of human emotion that the rulers of the baronies had sought to crush. Grant had expanded his own worldview in the form of a friendship with the feral child of the Outlands they knew as Domi. At first, Grant and Domi had been opponents, the young outlander employed by a smuggling ring under the Pit boss Guana Teague. However, an act of compassion on Grant’s part for Domi, as she was wounded and abused by the sluglike Teague, had formed a bond between them. For a long time, Domi had acted as if it was something inspired by sexual attraction, but the bright young feral woman and Grant finally realized that their bond was more along the line of surrogate father and daughter, especially when Grant became romantically involved with Shizuka, the leader of the Tigers of Heaven. The love between Grant and Domi was as strong as ever, but it had found its true form, rather than the sexual tension that had first developed.
Returning to Brigid, Grant realized that though he and Kane often joked about Brigid’s predilection to launch into an educational lecture, her relentless pursuit and sharing of knowledge was infectious. Both Kane and Grant had been spurred to learn about the world before civilization was burned to ashes in nuclear fire, and to seek out lore that extended far beyond their old worldview as dictated by the barons. Where Brigid became physically adept and skilled in the arts of war, Kane and Grant saw their intellectual horizons broadened.
Rounding out the three aspects of mind, body and soul, it didn’t escape Grant’s notice that Kane’s presence in their lives had been an escape from a single-minded existence. Brigid Baptiste could have spent her entire life poring over historical artifacts and records without seeking human companionship, and Grant could have been condemned to a life where he relentlessly soldiered for Cobaltville until he died. The compassion and friendship that Kane had added to their lives was the agent of change that made everything possible.
It was Kane who had the curiosity to seek out the strange matter-transfer device utilized by Teague’s smugglers. It was Kane who questioned the authority that told him to look away. It was Kane who saw that there was something more than just what was in front of their eyes. Certainly, Kane himself was a physically adept and capable warrior, and he had a keen perception that at times bordered on psychic sensitivity, but the man who had gone alone into the valley at Epona’s request was not just a warrior or a seeker of knowledge. He sought out what was right; he was a man with a moral core that had chafed under orders to kill and crush rebellion, who felt more at home being a defender of those who couldn’t fight back, or helping those in need. Kane’s strength and intellect were slaves to a spirit that was driven to the service of others.
The smart thing for Kane to have done would have been to turn his back on Epona so the Cerberus explorers could have returned to the redoubt without a second thought of risking themselves. The right thing, however, was what Kane chose. The Appalachian mountain folk were under siege by a cruel and implacable enemy that had been given an edge by a mysterious foe. Allowing the Fomorians to continue unabated would result in suffering and unchecked evil.
In his readings, Grant came across a line by Edmund Burke. “For evil to succeed, all that is needed is for good men to do nothing.”
Grant wondered, with all those women who saw Kane’s “soul,” if any had ever read those words tattooed across his heart, because there was never a more defining quote for his friend and partner.
It was five hundred feet downslope to the edge of the pine forest that clung tenaciously to the mountainside, which was just outside of the range of his Sin Eater’s normal deployment parameters. With another flex of his forearm, the electric motors retracted the machine pistol, folding it from its active thirteen-inch length to only six inches, lying flatly against his forearm. The motorized holster clicked as the Sin Eater returned to its resting spot. It was time to make use of something more appropriate for the situation.
Grant opened his rifle bag and drew out one of his favorite pieces of equipment, the five-and-a-half-foot-long Barrett M-85 .50-caliber rifle. Designed in the twentieth century as a means of allowing a ground soldier to stave off armored fighting vehicles short of a tank, the Barrett could hurl its missiles over two miles. Though it was only a single shot, it utilized .50-caliber Browning machine gun ammunition and held eleven rounds when fully loaded. A smaller man would have had trouble hauling around the thirty-pound rifle, but it fit comfortably in Grant’s massive hands.
Grant had wondered if it had been overkill to bring such a handheld cannon to this mission, but when he saw that the Appalachian scouts had their own .50-caliber long rifles, he knew that he hadn’t overreacted. Whoever the Fomorians were, they were creatures of impressive strength and durability, requiring more than standard small-arms fire to stop conclusively.
All of that information only served to worry Grant more about Kane and his fate. The Sin Eaters were powerful side arms, having proved their worth against heavily armored foes such as the Nephilhim drones in the service of the Annunaki, or Magistrate stormtroopers in their black, impregnable polycarbonate shells, but as the mountain folk had all manner of calibers at their disposal to deploy against the man-eating mutants that tormented them, their choice of arm was telling. The riflelike power of the Sin Eater might wound, but only the steel-smashing force of a .50-caliber round was sufficient for the Appalachians to trust against the Fomorians.
“You cannot move until Kane is in plain sight!” Epona said.
Grant glared at the witch woman, his rage only barely under control. “Do I look like I’m getting off this fucking rock?”
“Mind yourself, stranger,” Epona warned.
Grant turned away, pushing the aggravating witch out of his thoughts. It was time to do everything he could to watch over his best friend in the world. That meant pulling up the hood folded into the collar of his shadow suit. The fabric sheathed the big man’s head, conforming to it snugly as if it had been grown as a second skin for him. In truth, the high-tech polymers of the shadow suit were pliant enough to fit anyone who wore one, stretching or contracting, yet giving up none of its environmental protection capabilities.
But Grant hadn’t donned the hood to keep out a chill. Instead, he drew the face piece of the shadow suit, a rolled-up mask kept in a flat pocket, and affixed it to the edges of the hood. An electrostatic charge gave an inaudible crackle before the unit was sealed to his skull. Though the mask was opaque to outside viewers, as soon as the charge hooked the mask in place, Grant was able to see through the circuitry laden fabric.
Though Grant had hated squeezing into old Magistrate armor suits, he had enjoyed the advanced optics and communications abilities built into the Mag helmets. It had taken months of experimentation with the shadow suits to convince the veteran Grant that they offered the same sensory enhancements as the Mag helmets, except in a far more compact and portable form. As well, with the hood tucked into the collar and the face piece folded away, the shadow suits were far less imposing than the ominous black helmets and polycarbonate armor shells of old. Grant still pulled a jacket and pants over the shadow suit sometimes, to give himself some pockets and a modicum of modesty. The skintight uniform conformed to every contour of his body, so while he might have been able to walk through an Antarctic blizzard without feeling a single chill, he wore pants to keep his sense of decency.
Grant focused his eyes, and the remarkable technology built into the mask interpreted his eye movements and magnified his vision. Suddenly, it was as if he was only five feet away from the tree line, and Grant swept the forest, looking for signs of Kane. Gunshots cracked, and the magnification dropped back to zero, a green heads-up circle showing in Grant’s vision. He adjusted his gaze to that spot where the suit had picked up the sound. All he could see were trees, but now Grant had at least an idea where Kane was on the slope.
“Can you see anything?” Brigid asked, unfurling her own hood and drawing out her face mask.
“No, but apparently the suits can pick up the origin points of loud sounds,” Grant said.
Brigid nodded, affixing her face mask into place. “Like that last gunshot.”
The former archivist turned to Epona. “This isn’t violating the letter of your law, is it?”
Grant smirked behind the safety and anonymity of his faceplate. Though environmentally he wouldn’t even feel the iciest breeze, a chill ran through him at the sound of Brigid’s question to Epona. Diplomacy and courtesy were all fine, but right now, Kane was shooting at something, and from the sound of things, he wasn’t having an easy time.
Epona shook her head in response to the barbed question. “Just remember, you can only go to Kane’s aid when he is in plain sight to us. Who knows how far you can see into the forest with your technology, but we are not gifted like you.”
Grant’s fist clenched around his Barrett, tendons creaking under his polymer glove. “Trust me, witch. If I could see him right now, I’d tell you hillbillies to go piss uphill.”
“Behave,” Brigid admonished, though this time her heart wasn’t in the warning. She gripped the handles of her Copperhead submachine gun with as much tension as Grant felt. He couldn’t see her knuckles through the black polymer of her gloves, but he knew that she was as white-knuckled with concern for Kane as he was.
Grant stared, as if trying to command the shadow suit to spontaneously develop the power of X-ray vision to peer through tree trunks and other foliage as if they were made of glass. He rested the Barrett’s steel-girder-like stock on his thick, powerful thigh, because even his powerful shoulders couldn’t hold the heavy rifle aloft forever. Crouched deeply, resting on his haunches, Grant was poised to explode, but the fuse burned far too slowly for his taste.
He activated his Commtact, opening a connection back to Cerberus redoubt, where Lakesh, Bry and others were watching the events of this mission as closely as they could.
“Bry, you there?” Grant asked.
“Nah. I’m in the middle of a Three Stooges marathon and eating bonbons,” the computer expert replied with his typical, laid-back sarcasm.
Grant rolled his eyes. “Do you have anything that could make this wait a little more bearable?”
“There’s only so much I can do with a virtual reality girlfriend for you,” Bry answered, but Grant could hear the clatter of his fingertips across a keyboard as he commanded the network of satellites from his computer console. Bry’s acerbic, bored tone was the young genius’s armor against a world of panic and emergency.
“Kane,” Brigid said over the communications link. “Where is he now?”
All the Cerberus personnel had been fitted with subcutaneous biolink transponders that, among other things, allowed Cerberus redoubt to monitor their whereabouts.
“Range?” Grant asked, rising off his haunches. “Bry, give me—”
“He’s 4200 feet from your position, which means 3700 from the tree line,” Bry answered. “He’s getting closer.”
“But still not in plain sight,” Grant growled.
“Where is he?” Epona asked. Anxiety and concern had crept into her voice. Whether it was genuine worry for Kane and the people standing watch for him, or it was fear of reprisal from an angry Grant, it was a disarming change.
“Still a long run from the tree line,” Grant told her. “It’s a two-way shooting match now, so that means one of the Fomorians has an assault rifle.”
“More than one,” Epona warned. “That’s why we called you for help.”
“So you’ve got mutant freaks who need 50-caliber rifles to kill them now armed with assault weapons, and you told us to send one of our own after them while he’s outnumbered and outmuscled?” Grant snapped. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”
“Kane told us that he was as silent as the wind and twice as hard to capture,” Epona said. “We figured that he would be stealthy and not end up on the run from a superhuman horde with high-tech weapons!”
Grant was tempted to rip his face mask off his hood, but he needed its advanced optics to keep an eye on Kane. Luckily, his hood’s sensors picked up the chatter of more automatic weapons. “What’s Kane’s range to the tree line, Bry?”
“Now 3400 feet. He’s not making much progress, and according to the audio pickups on your hood, there are four hostiles shooting at him,” Bry informed him.
“Four,” Grant grumbled. The bark of a Sin Eater was amplified by the hood’s sensors. He shouldered his rifle, even though there was no way that someone could see through 1100 yards of tree trunks. The rifle was something solid to hold on to, a firm piece of reality that was an anchor when all he had were electronic ghost images thrown against his eyeballs. Intelligence hurled at him was not a substitute for his personal senses. Sight, hearing, touch—he trusted those much more than some anonymous computer setup. He wanted tactile feedback.
Instead, all he could do was wait and hope for a single glimpse of Kane, if he somehow managed to fight his way past a quartet of superhuman mutants.
Chapter 3
Brigid Baptiste glared at Granny Epona, then made a decision. She wasn’t one given to brash action, but right now she knew that something was wrong with the whole situation. Epona had gone from stating that Kane’s scouting mission was one of honor to stating that he was sent because he could move with ghostlike grace among the trees in order to determine the machinations that had been involved in the upgrade of the Fomorian raiders’ equipment. At the very least, Epona was hiding something.
Brigid swiftly went into Grant’s war bag, drew out a .45-caliber SIG-Sauer P-220 pistol and its spare magazines strapped together in a shoulder holster sized for her slender, athletic frame. The big ex-Magistrate spotted the activity, and she could imagine his eyebrow quirking underneath the opaque black hood of his shadow suit. The .45-caliber pistol had been something that Brigid had asked Grant to carry for her ever since their encounter with the mad cybergoddess Hera in New Olympus, a decision reinforced by a subsequent battle against the nanotechnologically enhanced Durga. Her little TP-9 pistol might have been more than enough to deal with ordinary threats, but against superhuman beings, she’d developed the opinion that bigger was indeed better. Since the TP-9 couldn’t fire the same kind of superheavy slugs that the Sin Eater ate like gumdrops, the only way to deal with armor plating was to go with a bigger, more powerful gun.
“Granny Epona, you can tell your men to go piss uphill,” Brigid said, tightening the SIG’s holster straps. “Kane needs us.”
With that, she turned and began to sprint down the slope toward the tree line.
“Brigid!” Grant’s voice bellowed over her Commtact.
Brigid wished that she had the ability to talk, but at the moment, she was concentrating on keeping her balance and avoiding obstacles. She’d hoped that she would reach the tree line and that a pine tree would stop her headlong progress, but now even her intellect raced, throwing up a series of possibilities that ended up with her encountering an impact that would overwhelm the shadow suit’s protective capabilities.
“Brigid, stop now!” Grant bellowed over the Commtact.
The force of Grant’s order, transmitted through her jawbone, made it seem as if he had taken control of her body. She shot her feet out, ramrod straight, and her heels sank into the soft shale. She’d passed down the slope to a point where the ground had softened into soil and areas of mossy scrub. By extending her legs, she’d applied the brakes and slowed enough that she could control her descent.
“Thanks,” Brigid said.
She could feel Grant’s smile, even over the radio. “Anytime, Brigid.”
Brigid stopped only twenty feet from the edge of the trees. Looking back, she could see where she’d first straightened out and the furrows her heels had cut through the slope as she’d slowed. She pulled her .45 from its holster. “I don’t see anything yet down here, Grant. Do you?”
“Not a damn thing,” Grant responded. “Nothing on the suit optics nor through the Barrett’s scope. You go into the woods too far, you’ll be on your own.”
“Not going to try my way down?” Brigid asked.
“I’ll be along,” Grant responded. “Just a little slower.”
Brigid scanned uphill and saw the big ex-Magistrate running, jumping and dodging to avoid boulders. She could see why he was reluctant to turn himself into a human avalanche, as the Barrett was not as easily portable as the heavy pistol she carried. The rifle would either serve as a brutal clothesline that would catch on something and do its best to cleave Grant in two, or the weapon would shatter important parts, leaving it useless as a firearm and left only as a clumsy, unwieldy club.
“I’ll stay in touch,” Brigid said, and she charged into the trees, relying on the heads-up optics in her faceplate to plot Kane’s last known positions by the sound of his Sin Eater.
“Just remember, that .45 is nowhere nearly as potent as the rifles the scouts and I are carrying,” Grant said. “If you have to shoot, aim for the face, not the forehead. The area around the nose—”
“Yes. The area around the nose has the weakest maxillofacial bone structure, enabling the surest incapacitation on a head shot,” Brigid replied. “You act like I don’t have a photographic memory.”
“Well, it’s not as if I’m feeling particularly useful jogging down a mountainside five hundred feet behind you,” Grant growled. “Leave me something to feel worthwhile.”
“Sorry,” Brigid said. She remembered that Kane’s Commtact wasn’t activated. Calling out loud might draw Kane’s attention, but that might serve as a distraction that would allow the Fomorians to fall upon him and crush the life out of him. Furthermore, a shout would just as likely turn Kane’s attention from survival to concern for her.
Brigid had spent years forging herself from an academic into an equal partner to her two warrior allies. She refused to put herself in the position of a walking disaster, the role of someone whose presence only served to expose the team to more dangers. She operated a control interface on the forearm of her shadow suit, and the black polymer suddenly shimmered and took on the pattern of the surrounding forest floor. The real-time, adaptive camouflage, while it wouldn’t offer true invisibility, would turn the Cerberus explorer into a shadow among the trees. If Kane was in trouble, her sudden arrival wouldn’t break his concentration, and she’d have the element of surprise against any creature endeavoring to tear the man limb from limb.
“I’ve gone camouflage, Grant,” she said over her Commtact.
“Remember to stay out of the cross fire,” Grant offered. “And don’t forget, your shoulder harness isn’t camouflaged.”
Brigid looked down at her shoulder, seeing the nylon-and-leather holster strap visible against her optic digital camouflage. She wrinkled her nose. “Noted. Thank you.”
She padded off into the pine trees, heading toward where she’d last heard the sounds of battle.
Brigid scrambled through the woods, keeping herself close to the trees but avoiding branches so that she minimized the commotion of her passage. There were more factors at moving unnoticed than having an electronically enhanced fabric adapt like a chameleon to its background, and she was fortunate to have a teacher in Kane who had schooled her in the arts of stealth. Up ahead in a clearing she spotted Kane, stripped naked to the waist and battling a tall, gangly monstrosity. The cyclopean beast screeched in untamed fury as it struggled with the half-naked Cerberus warrior in its arms.
Brigid considered taking a shot at the Fomorian warrior, but Kane thrashed violently, twisting to keep the deadly bear hug around his torso from tightening. The deceptively slender hunter’s forearms were cabled masses of muscle and sinew that looked to have the strength of anacondas, and the moment his adversary had a solid grasp, Kane’s ribs and spine would be subjected to a lethal crushing force. With the two opponents wrestling fiercely, there was no way that Brigid could take a clean shot without the possibility of hitting Kane.
She stuffed the handgun back into its holster and scanned around for something that would be more useful. She spotted a thick branch on the ground and scooped it up. Still practically invisible as anything other than a blurred wraith, she lunged toward the Fomorian, swinging her wooden club at the back of the its knees. The creature’s long, strong legs buckled in instantaneous reaction to the impact. Despite the superhuman physique and size of the mutant, it still had basic human anatomy, and Brigid had reasoned that it also had basic human reflex. The crash of the branch across the back of its knees inspired an automatic bending of the creature’s legs. That, combined with Kane’s struggles on top of it, forced the Fomorian to crash to the ground.
The Cerberus warrior hammered his fist violently into the monstrosity’s throat, punching again and again with every ounce of his strength. Kane’s physique had placed the bulk of his muscle mass in his upper chest and shoulders, and now, as if he were some beast-reared jungle lord, he unleashed that power. His back and shoulders flexed and rippled with each downward stroke, the smack of his fist on the mutant’s vulnerable face and throat cracking through the forest. There was no grace, no art in this beating; the time for unarmed combat finesse had disappeared the moment Kane had been stripped of weaponry and forced to fight tooth and claw. The Fomorian hunter’s nose was a bloody pit in the center of his skull, and twisted lips coughed up a torrent of gore from where Kane’s fist had crushed its windpipe. Its arms flailed helplessly, trying to block the maddened assault, but in the end, it was useless.
Brigid knew that Kane would never die easily, and this day, he’d fought off the hounds of death seeking his soul.
“Baptiste?” Kane asked, bursting from his opponent’s grasp.
“Yes,” she said. She tapped her forearm, canceling the camouflage effect. Brigid looked the man over and saw that his forehead had been split open, a ragged gash that seeped blood into his eyes. His legs had a wobble to them, but he fought against the urge to collapse, shoulders rising and falling as he breathed deeply to regain his composure. “What happened?”
“I was jumped,” Kane murmured. “Everything since then’s been kind of blurry. I don’t even know where my weapons went.”
Brigid slid out of her shoulder harness. “Take this, then.”
Kane blinked, looking at the pistol and spare magazines in their holster. He looked confused for a moment, but slid his arms through the shoulder loops and drew the handgun. “When did you start carrying this?”
“I’ve had Grant keep a spare gun for me in his war bag,” Brigid said as she knelt by the dead Fomorian. She quickly took a strip of its ragged vest and tore it free, creating a long bandage. “No reason why you’d know anything about it. Come over here.”
Kane obeyed her command without fuss, so Brigid could tell that something wasn’t completely right with him. Her best guess, given the minimal blood loss and his uncertain stance, was that he’d suffered a concussion when he’d been struck in the head. Kane was fortunate that the heavy curved bone of the skull had made his forehead one of the most difficult structures to break on the human body. Still, with the blood seeping from the wound and pouring down over his brow, he’d have a hard time seeing. She tied the bandage around his head, but didn’t knot it too tightly. Too much pressure would only aggravate any head trauma that she couldn’t see right now.
“Thanks, Baptiste,” Kane muttered. Brigid offered her shoulder to allow him to stand back up.
“You’re going to be freezing to death in a few minutes unless we get you to shelter,” Brigid said.
Kane grimaced. “I can deal with the cold for now. It’s not as bad as it is higher up on the mountain. But we should be able to borrow a blanket or some furs from Epona’s scouts, shouldn’t we?”
“I’m not sure we can trust her,” Brigid began. “Even if she is on the up and up, I broke the rules and came into the forest after you.”
Kane smirked through the pain. “I’m a bad influence on you. Big guns, and wrecking diplomacy…”
“Cut the criticism,” Brigid admonished, “and activate your Commtact.”
Kane nodded and reached behind his ear to activate his comm device. “Grant, we’re trying to concentrate here. Shut it!”
“Well, it’s about damn time!” Grant cursed. “If I hadn’t shaved my head bald, I’d be a mass of gray hair by now.”
“Listen…my head’s a little fuzzy right now and I’m trying to climb a steep mountainside while half-naked,” Kane complained. “You throwing a fit on your side of things is not making my skull ache any less, got it?”
Brigid kept an eye on Kane’s progress. His body was already shiny with a sheen of sweat, gleaming off his rippling muscles as he fought against the incline. The steep slope was an effort for her, as well, her legs burning with each push. Brigid at least had the shadow suit to regulate her perspiration and body temperature as they climbed. Once they hit the open slope, which was at six thousand feet more or less, Kane’s wet skin would be exposed to a freezing wind. Hypothermia would be inevitable, and frostbite a distinct possibility.
“All right. Did you find out anything?” Grant asked.
“Yeah. I found out that the Fomorians have some old friends of ours working with them,” Kane said. “The Thrush Continuum.”
“What?” Grant grimaced.
“I’ll explain later,” Kane answered. “Right now, I can barely make heads or tails out of anything. What kind of explosives did you bring along?”
“The usual assortment of grens and plastic explosives,” Grant replied. “You got anything special in your war bag?”
“No, but I’m thinking that we can at least drop an avalanche on the Fomorian camp on this mountainside,” Kane said. “It’s not going to be a long-term solution, but we can retreat and regroup while they’re digging themselves out of the rubble.”
Brigid and Kane continued ascending, both of them thankful for the pine tree trunks that allowed them good handholds as they fought their way uphill. Kane’s knee buckled, and he slumped against the bark of a pine, eyes clenched in momentary pain.
“Let me help,” Brigid said.
“I’ll be all right,” Kane answered breathlessly. He rummaged around in the cargo pants that he and Grant took to wearing over the lower halves of their shadow suits. Finally he ripped open a pocket and found a foil envelope within. His fingers trembled as he tore into the packet, withdrawing a rustling mass of shiny metallic sheeting. Taking the corners of the thermal blanket, he wrapped them around his neck, tying the blanket into an improvised cloak that draped around his shoulders.
“Allow me?” Brigid asked.
Kane blinked, his eyes unfocused. “Better idea?”
“Somewhat,” Brigid answered. She untied the thermal blanket and pulled a utility knife from her belt. She sliced a slit in the center large enough to fit Kane’s head through. Then she patted through his pockets until she found a roll of cord. Gathering the blanket at Kane’s waist, she left plenty of room for his arms to move freely, but cinched the blanket so that he now possessed a shiny metallic parka to shield him. “You forgot that you had this?”
“I took a whack to the head, damn it,” Kane reminded her. “Plus, I thought I could last a little longer against the cold.”
Gunfire bellowed below and Brigid whirled. “Damn it, they’ve caught up to us.”
Kane fisted the handgun that she’d lent him. “It’ll take a lot to put them down.”
Brigid shook her head. “Give me that and my magazines back. You keep climbing.”
“Damn it, Baptiste.”
“You’re injured, and you’re the brightest, shiniest target on this mountainside,” Brigid returned. “I’m in one piece, and the shadow suit makes me harder to hit. And if they do shoot me, I’ll be harder to hurt. Get moving!”
Kane glowered at her. “Just be careful. The Thrushes didn’t just give them rifles—”
“Talk later. Run now!” Brigid snapped.
Movement rustled among the pines, and she whirled to face it, bringing up the big .45. A one-armed monstrosity lurched into view, holding a SIG AMT rifle in its hand. Brigit aligned the sights and fired two shots from her pistol, aiming at the troll-like face of the Fomorian hunter, her shadow suit’s faceplate optics enabling her to focus the handgun’s point of aim as if she had a laser targeting device on the pistol. A mass of cheekbone exploded off the Fomorian’s face with the first hit, the second round carving a ghastly furrow along the creature’s bald temple. The mutant dropped its rifle and clutched its wounded face with its sole hand. Brigid cursed the haste with which she’d fired her shots, wasting ammunition and making the man-eater suffer. It may have been a murderous beast, but unnecessary cruelty had never been part of any of the three Cerberus warriors.
As it was, she had bought herself some time, and glanced back to see Kane furiously scrambling up the hill. A large form in black leaped down by his side, and Brigid nearly whirled her pistol around to fire on it when she recognized the unmistakable bulk of Grant, hooking one hand under Kane’s shoulder.
“Move it, Brigid!” Grant bellowed, hefting his massive Barrett with one rippling arm. The .50-caliber rifle bellowed authoritatively to punctuate his command. “This slope’s going to be a no-man’s-land in a minute!”
Brigid spun back and saw that Grant had put the creature she’d shot out of its misery. Muzzle-flashes flickered among the trees, but the .30-caliber rounds found only dirt and tree trunks. Two of the Fomorian hunters were back in the forest, trying to finish the job they started. Brigid stuffed her gun into her belt and clawed at the mountainside on all fours, her lean and athletically toned limbs helping her to eat the distance between herself and the two ex-Magistrates near the tree line. A tree root for a handhold here, a leap off the trunk of a pine there, and mad pawing at the dirt were what she needed to climb as she’d never climbed before.
Grant continued to thunder away with his mighty rifle, bolts of blazing hot lead slicing down to cover Brigid against the advance and harassing fire of the Fomorians. Like some form of obsidian storm god, Grant cut loose. A tree trunk shattered under the impact of one monster .50-caliber slug, and the pine tree crackled, groaned and toppled, crashing to the slope and skidding toward the Fomorians. One of those mutated hunters let out a wail of horror as the tree toppled toward him like a massive emerald spear. Its long limbs sprang and hurled it out of its path, branches shearing off against other tree trunks, producing deep gouges in the bark. The impact of the plummeting pine broke another apart, but one shank of wood held on tenaciously, so that the tree was only bent, its top half dangling like a pendulum in the wake of the one-log avalanche.
Brigid scurried up to Grant as he reloaded the Barrett. She could see the tree line just past him. Grenades and explosive charges were wired together, nudged against tree trunks and two large, flat masses of granite that broke up the incline of the slope, giving the trees something level to stand upon. Though she wasn’t an explosives expert, she knew that Grant had set the explosives in such a manner as to shear off this particular chunk of forest and hurl it down the slope like a massive guillotine of stone, dirt and wood.
“We’ve got to move,” Grant said as he slung the rifle over one broad shoulder. “Take the detonator.”
Brigid took the box, and Grant scooped up Kane as if he were a rag doll. She followed Grant as he charged uphill, cradling his injured partner and held off pressing the trigger for the mass of charges planted at the tree line. Once they were a safe distance from the blast area, Grant would know. Brigid didn’t want to make that guess. If she fired the detonator too soon, they would be swept up in the torrent. If she waited too long, more Fomorians would scurry into rifle range and dozens of rifles would chop them to ribbons.
“Do it!” Grant ordered.
Brigid thumbed the stud, and the whole mountainside heaved violently. Behind her white-hot fire faded instantly into a plume of blackened smoke and airborne ash and dust. The air crackled with the sound of rock and soil peeling off the slope under a sharp wave of energy released by Grant’s explosive setup. The crackle deepened into an all-pervasive rumble, the thick clouds sucked down along with the avalanche as the rapidly descending mass of the mountainside created a vacuum. Trees snapped and exploded under the shock wave, but as much as Brigid focused on the receding landslide, even with the telescopic optics in her shadow suit, trees she knew to be four and five feet in diameter resembled nothing more than twigs and pencils as they toppled and pinwheeled through the turgid mass. The avalanche’s height was not the only thing that grew. It widened, spreading like a fan of rocky devastation. The rumble became less of a constant storm of sound engulfing them as the mass tumbled down to the valley below, but Brigid could still feel it vibrating up through her legs.
“Was that good enough?” Grant asked Kane.
Brigid turned and looked at her partner. His steely eyes held a cold rage in them that she had rarely seen before. Whatever evil they had inflicted upon him, it had inspired a similar fury in him. The rage faded as the landslide crashed to the bottom of the valley, settling a thick fog of debris over the floor. He nodded slowly, tentatively so as not to aggravate the pain of his head injury.
“For now,” Kane said. “Now put me down. I can walk the rest of the way back.”
Grant sighed and let Kane stand on his own two feet. Brigid could see traces of his earlier wobble, but the brief respite had steeled the man’s determination to walk on his own power.
Epona and the scouts waited in a line, just farther up the slope. Epona remained silent, the shadow suit’s telescopic vision showing her features cast in dread awe of the power that Grant had unleashed, carving a horrendous scar along the side of a mountain. The scouts, on the other hand, had their rifles raised in the air, cheers for the thunderous blow struck against their Fomorian enemies echoing from on high.
“For now?” Brigid asked.
“I said these things are incredibly tough,” Kane answered, his voice taut and brittle with annoyance and pain. “We might have killed some of them and wrecked whatever equipment the Thrush Continuum provided for them, but this isn’t over yet.”
Grant sneered. “Shit. If a black hole couldn’t kill that android freak, dropping a mountain on him won’t be more than a minor inconvenience.”
“Something’s really eating at you, Kane. What’s the big worry?” Brigid asked.
Kane grimaced. “Because the Thrush that’s down there, working with Bres and Balor and the rest of those monsters, he’s wearing my face.”
Grant and Brigid shared a glance, then stared at their wounded comrade.
Kane held out both hands to Grant, a near universal symbol of surrendering himself into restraints. “And just so we’re sure that I’m not some kind of preprogrammed fake that just thinks I’m the real deal, I want you two to bind me up and make damn certain I’m not some android infiltrator sent to murder everyone in Cerberus.”
Standing on a silent, gouged mountainside, watching Grant seize Kane’s wrists roughly to put a plastic cable tie around them, Brigid Baptiste felt as if the avalanche were just a rug, pulling her whole world out from underneath her.
Chapter 4
Reba DeFore looked over Kane in the observation room of the Cerberus redoubt sick bay. In silence and darkness, Mohandas Lakesh Singh, Domi, Brigid Baptiste and Grant sat on the other side of one-way glass. No one wanted to speak as DeFore took blood samples, fingerprints, retinal scans and cheek swabs with practiced precision.
DeFore was a stocky woman with tanned skin and ash-blond hair, which she usually wore in braids. This day it was pulled back into a bun beneath her surgeon’s cap. She had served as the redoubt’s chief physician ever since its inception by Lakesh. Her knowledge of anatomy had been bolstered by years of all manner of practical application, from meatball surgery to delivering the half-human spawn of a Quad Vee hybrid in mid-transformation. While the redoubt’s personnel had all been trained in first aid, DeFore’s scientific knowledge of the human body and how it worked was remarkable. Of course, if DeFore’s talents hadn’t been impressive, Lakesh wouldn’t have recruited her for his rebellion against the tyranny of the baronies.
Kane rested on the table, poked and prodded, subjected to all manner of probes in DeFore’s collection of equipment. Lakesh and the others sat on the other side of the glass, not speaking, barely even breathing loudly as they awaited word on whether or not the man on the table was or some transdimensional construct sent to infiltrate their base.
“You know, there is the possibility that Thrush could have mentally reprogrammed a Kane from a different casement,” Brigid spoke up at the end of the second hour of examinations.
DeFore had been consistently handing off samples to her staff, Manitius base medical experts who had been upgrading and redesigning technology since relocating from their station on the moon. Where in the late twentieth century processing genetic markers could be measured in months, the new machinery they had developed pared the analysis to hours. She’d called up a readout on the screen, and the preliminary testing showed identical matches for several gene pairs, though the process had only been forty percent complete. “They’d be identical down to a genetic scale, but—”
“We know what we’re dealing with when it comes to Thrush, dearest Brigid,” Lakesh said, cutting her off. Lakesh rested his chin on the knuckles of his fist. Though born on the Indian subcontinent, the scientist had entered his third century of life with blue eyes, replacements for his original orbs, which had failed due to their advanced years and the rigors of the cryogenic sleep that had extended his existence. More than 250 years old chronologically, the brilliant scientist had been restored to the relatively youthful age of his early forties, thanks to the incredible technology of the Thrush Continuum, wielded by Sam the Imperator. With a touch and an infusion of nanotechnology robots into his physical system, the ravages of age, countless surgeries to replace failing organs with harvested or cybernetic replacements, and the stresses of surviving under the iron rule of the hybrid barons had been erased.
The one thing that hadn’t been returned to “normal” as he’d seen it, was the fact that his eyes were still blue. It was because they had their own genetic code from an unknown donor. The cataracts that had started to develop, however, had been eaten away, nanites transforming the damaged tissues into healthy, vital, young tissues.
If Sam had the power to undo two centuries of aging with a touch, constructing a living man, an exact duplicate with memories and behavior patterns to match the original, wasn’t outside of his capabilities. DNA, blood testing, fingerprinting, all of that would only prove that the Kane they were looking at was biologically human, not a cleverly built android duplicate.
Lakesh turned to Grant. In the darkness, his dark bronzed features looked particularly grim, illuminated by the light filtering through the window. Grant’s brow was wrinkled with the same worries that Brigid had just voiced. Of all the people in the room, though, Grant had known Kane the longest. The two men were as close to brothers as could possibly be without sharing a single parent.
Grant was probably riddled with worry over not being able to tell if his closest friend on the planet had been subverted by a doppelganger. Sure, as they came through the mat-trans chamber, Bry had stated that the three signatures were nonanomalous, but that was merely a machine. Grant had been a Magistrate, and he lived his life dependent on senses and instincts that weren’t susceptible to the whims of electronic failure or alteration of computer code. Being told by Kane that he himself doubted the veracity of his existence had cast the same shadow over Grant’s observational abilities.
“All right, Kane. I’ve checked everything in our medical file on you,” DeFore said. “There are no artificial constructs within your body, except for the Commtact implant on your mastoid. Your retinas and fingerprints are identical. I checked with Brigid, and your hair and beard growth are identical to what they were when you first headed off into the woods. Your bones are normal. Your reflexes are suboptimal, but that’s to be expected with a concussion. Blood chemistry shows no variants from before.”
“What about the contents of my stomach?” Kane asked.
“There aren’t any, but I looked at your throat, and you had vomited earlier today,” DeFore said.
Kane grimaced.
“You got hit on the head hard enough to be knocked out. And you stated that the Thrush duplicate and the Fomorian had taken you captive after rendering you unconscious,” DeFore said. “When you woke up, you puked, emptying your stomach.”
“Yes,” Kane added, annoyed. “You get knocked out, you wake up and vomit. It’s happened enough times to me…I think.”
“What I can tell is that you suffered a mild concussion. Your skull, thick wonder that it is, hasn’t been fractured,” DeFore said. “You’re not a cyborg. You’re not an android. You’re as real as can possibly be.”
Kane touched his forehead, feeling the nylon sutures that had closed up the gash. “Another scar.”
“If there is, I’ll be disappointed,” DeFore told him. “That should heal up nicely.”
Kane looked at the one-way glass, as if trying to see past the mirrored surface on his side and look into the faces of his friends. “So, I’m me. I’m Kane, right?”
“You tell us,” Grant spoke said into the microphone in the observation room.
Lakesh felt his gut tighten at the pronouncement. Yes, they were dealing with a pandimensional being with access to technologies that even the brilliant scientific knowledge amassed at Cerberus couldn’t even dream of. But would Thrush go so far as to make an unwitting duplicate that actively voiced doubts of its own veracity? Or would the fiendish hive mind be so crass and subtle as to engage in a series of obfuscating maneuvers to plant a cunning and savage entity in their midst?
Lakesh’s brilliant mind went over every single iteration of the ruse that had seemingly thrown their friend into such paranoia that he had had himself taken prisoner and subjected to a wide suite of physical, chemical and genetic scans. He tried to apply Occam’s razor to each of these plots, but realized that, given the history of their brutal encounters with Colonel Thrush and his continuum of alternate selves, carving away the improbable was impossible. Which ended up with another potential outcome that the pandimensional menace could have sought. By inserting a poisonous doubt into Cerberus, a doubt affecting the man who, essentially, was the heart of the entire war against the Annunaki overlords and all others who would enslave Earth and humanity, had Thrush taken the wind out of their sails? The android multiverse traveler had just made it so that they couldn’t trust one-third of the triumvirate of heroes who had formed such a confluence that they could accomplish the impossible.
Without that perfect team at the core of Cerberus, savagely undercut by doubt, the whole of the rebellion against Enlil and his kind, and by proxy, all the other superpowers seeking Earth’s domination, had been instantly defanged.
“Friend Kane?” Lakesh asked. “You’re the one who brought this crisis to our attention. What do you feel?”
Kane closed his eyes, concentrating. When he finally opened them, he sighed. “I feel bruises all over my carcass, a splitting headache and I’m getting nauseous from lack of food and drink. Beyond that, it’s anybody’s damn guess.”
Grant studied his friend’s face as he spoke. He turned to the others. “Sounds as authentic as ever to me.”
“No variations from Kane’s normal form of speech,” Brigid added. “Right now, we’ve got one hundred percent verification on retinal and fingerprint analysis, dental records are identical right down to the wear factor and, after forty percent of the data has been analyzed on his genetics, there is not a single variation. Healed scars match photographic record of prior wound recovery, as well, except for the new injuries he picked up in the battle with the Fomorians.”
Kane looked at the mirrored glass separating him from the rest of the leadership of the Cerberus base. “So does that mean I can have a cup of coffee and a pot roast sandwich? Or just crackers and water?”
Grant leaned to the intercom. “Edwards, give Kane his damn lunch before he starves to death.”
The hulking ex-Magistrate under Domi’s command in Cerberus Away Team Beta strode into the operating room carrying a tray. Edwards was almost the same size as Grant, and Lakesh marveled at the rippling power emanating from the ex-Mag as he handed the meal to Kane.
“Edwards,” Domi spoke up, “you couldn’t intimidate the real Kane. You can unclench your muscles now.”
Edwards looked down at Kane, then snorted. “If you’re just a fake, I’ll take your head off.”
Kane rubbed the crown of his head, as touching his forehead would obviously unleash whole new waves of pain. He glanced up to the physical monster in the room with him and sighed. “You know, you’d actually be doing me a favor.”
DeFore put a small cup on the tray before Kane. “You step off the mat-trans all grim and determined not to show an ounce of human weakness, but after a few hours, you’re bitching that I’m not giving you some ibuprofen. If that’s not a sign he’s the real Kane, then I’ll eat my thermometer.”
Lakesh cupped his hand over his mouth. He wanted to tell DeFore not to make promises she might have to keep, but for now, he didn’t want to cause any conflict. He fought down the doubt from his voice and spoke up. “So now what are we going to do regarding the Thrush presence in the Poconos and their mutant assistants?”
“I dropped a mountainside onto them,” Grant said. “So for now, they’ll be off balance. Epona has moved her people to an older settlement before their expansion closer to the valley we hit with the avalanche. It will give the Appalachians some room and leave the Fomorian raiders nothing to attack.”
“Why couldn’t they just stay in the older valley?” Domi asked.
“Pride. The fact that the Fomorians would eventually track them down,” Brigid said. “As well, the hunting and water supplies are plentiful in that area, not exhausted like the area they’d abandoned. Right now, all Epona’s people have only a few days of supplies that they were able to move into the older shelters.”
“We could transport extra stuff to them,” Domi suggested.
“Really? Because we’ve got a redoubt full of people here,” Lakesh interjected. “I’m all for a little bit of charity, but we have our own needs to take care of, and the Appalachians don’t strike me as the type of people to willingly resort to welfare from people they barely trust.”
“It’s a temporary solution,” Grant concluded. “But between Cerberus Away Teams Alpha and Beta, we’ll be able to deal with whatever the Fomorians and Thrush can recover from the avalanche.”
“And if not, we can always request assistance from Shizuka and Aristotle,” Brigid said, mentioning the respective leaders of the Tigers of Heaven in New Edo and the Pantheon operating out of New Olympus. “Between a force of samurai and a squad of gear skeletons, we can hit the Fomorians with a lot of fighting skill and technology.”
Lakesh frowned. “Or give Thrush information about the extent of our allies. He knew about the Tigers of Heaven, we assume, since it was around the time he returned to Earth as the Imperator Sam that we first encountered them. Whether Thrush retains the knowledge of Enlil and the related technology is unknown for now.”
“And who’s to say that Thrush, being a robot himself, really would worry about the relatively primitive combat suits of the Olympians?” Grant asked. “It’d be like throwing a Deathbird after one of Enlil’s scout ships.”
Kane rapped his knuckles on the mirror. Lakesh sighed and turned on the lights in the meeting room, then retracted the one-way glass. “Yes, friend Kane?”
Kane swallowed his mouthful of sandwich. “I’d like to point out that while we know one form of Thrush, native to our planet, became Enlil, I don’t think that they share all the same technology. The Orb is as different from an Annunaki scout ship as you can get. Otherwise, Thrush would be sending his android copies after us in squadrons of craft, and the Orb would be parked in orbit, throwing down as much firepower as Tiamat could have brought to bear.”
Lakesh looked to Brigid for confirmation.
“He’s got a point, and this time it’s not the one at the top of his head,” Brigid said.
Kane winked at her, then chomped another bite out of his pot roast sandwich. DeFore gave him a mock slap on the shoulder.
“This isn’t your personal dining room,” she grumbled.
Kane nodded in agreement and rose to join his colleagues in the meeting room. DeFore handed him the rest of his meal tray, then barked orders for her interns to clean up and sterilize the observation room.
For the moment, things had returned to normal, but Lakesh kept his eye on Kane throughout the strategy meeting.
And from what he could tell about Grant and Brigid, their suspicions remained, hidden just below the surface.
Chapter 5
Grant spied Brigid take Kane out of the side door of the meeting room, and she gave him a quick nod while he was distracted. She was going to do her best to minimize any problems with him, whether he was genuine or fake. Limping and battered from hand-to-hand combat with what appeared to be the product of Tuatha de Danaan mutation technology, the Cerberus staff had a valid reason for sidelining the man who was, by record, reputation and the blood he’d shed, the star player for the human rebels. If anyone deserved a chance to throw himself back into a comfortable bed and get some rest after the battering he’d received, it was Kane.
Brigid, with her close relationship with Kane, took the task of escorting him out of the meeting room and assuring him that this was one crisis that Cerberus could handle without his assistance. Of course, that meant that Grant was going to be the only member of Cerberus Away Team Alpha immediately ready for action. He caught Domi looking mischievously at him.
“CAT Beta is ready to go,” Domi told him.
Lakesh’s forehead wrinkled with the statement. “We’re not even certain that friend Grant’s avalanche was sufficient to cripple the Fomorians and their Thrush liaison.”
“If the liaison is still in that valley,” Grant said, his voice low, as if he were tempting fate.
Lakesh looked toward the hallway, then cleared his throat.
“Come on, Moe,” Domi protested. “We’ll have Grant with us….”
“It just doesn’t seem to have the same confluence of fate that would be available if it were Kane, Brigid and Grant,” Lakesh said. “My apologies for any disrespect.”
Grant shook his head. “None taken.”
“Listen, if Kane is back at the Poconos, then we’re going to have to have people in the area to find him,” Domi said. “And outside of Sky Dog’s people, I’m the best wilderness tracker in this hemisphere.”
“She’s got a point,” Grant said. “And if Kane catches me sitting around Cerberus while we’ve got Thrush and mutant man-eaters running around and working together, he’ll want to get back out into the field.”
“Which could aggravate his injuries, leading to real problems if he’s the real thing,” Lakesh spoke up. “Or if he’s fake, give him the opportunity to return to the Thrush Continuum after accomplishing whichever task he was sent to do.”
“Even if it were just to throw doubt onto one of our own,” Domi added.
“We have to keep Kane here and under wraps for now,” Grant said. “Anything else is just an invitation to disaster. Lakesh, maybe you should start thinking about exactly what Thrush would want to do with the resources we have here at Cerberus that he couldn’t do from his Orb.”
“I’ve been running everything I could in my mind,” Lakesh said.
Grant nodded. “All you need to do is keep an eye on Kane to figure out what he’s trying to do here and put it up against what you’ve suspected.”
“Precisely,” Lakesh answered. “Be careful, darlingest Domi.”
“I’m going to have to say the same thing,” Domi returned. “Edwards, go get Sela. We’re suiting up for the field. Grant, you might—”
“I’m already on the way to the armory to pick up some spare gear for Kane,” Grant cut her off.
“And more restraints,” Domi added. “What we run into might look like Kane, but what if that really is the fake, and we’ve been stuck running around and picking up the infiltrator when we brought the real guy home?”
Grant grimaced. “DeFore, could you spare a couple painkillers for me? All this shit’s giving me a headache.”
“You’re not the only one lost here,” DeFore responded. “But I’m going to give you my educated opinion. I’ve been over that man easily forty times in the past. If he’s a duplicate, then whoever kidnapped the real Kane stripped him naked and looked over every inch of his body, then utilized some pretty impressive technology to copy every bit of scar tissue around.”
“That’s not saying much,” Lakesh returned. “Sam regressed my age. Remolding a patch of skin to look like healed tissue shouldn’t be beyond that level of biological engineering.”
“Or we could just be too damn paranoid for our own good,” Grant said. “Domi, did you get anything wrong about him?”
Domi shook her head. “It’s not as if I have the sense of smell of a dog or shit like that. I’m a good tracker, but the only superhuman ability I have are the soles of my feet. They’re harder than armadillo shells.”
Grant shrugged. “I just thought you’d spot something the rest of us didn’t think of. You’ve proved to be pretty perceptive on more than enough occasions.”
Domi sighed. “Sorry. I’m not thinking straight.”
“Which I believe could be Thrush’s plan,” Lakesh said.
“Whatever the plan, the more time we spend jawing about this shit, the closer it comes to succeeding,” Grant growled. “Come on, Domi.”
The pair was as physically different as could be, one tall, muscular and seemingly cast out of bronze and obsidian, the other small, wiry and looking as if she were crafted from porcelain. Yet the two people shared an identical intensity and determination as they left the meeting room.
BRIGID ACCOMPANIED Kane to the canteen, where he finished his meal. She watched as Kane threw away the remaining trash from his lunch. He sighed and picked up his plate and utensils, carrying them to the washing basin. “I know, don’t make more work for the kitchen staff. You’d think with all the extra bodies around, we’d need something to keep them busy.”
Brigid raised an eyebrow. “You mean that digging through the garbage for your fork and knife is a good utilization of some of the most brilliant minds left over from the twentieth century?”
Kane shrugged. “Look at the world they left behind for us. All that genius and…”
“You’re putting the blame for skydark on them?” Brigid asked. “Especially when we saw Colonel Thrush himself pull the trigger that blew up the Russian embassy?”
Kane shook his head and grimaced. “Thrush took advantage of the tensions those big brains created. I’m not absolving that freak. He’s the one who jumped me and set a bunch of Fomorian mutants on my ass. Right now, I’m just realizing how antisocial I feel with all these people crowding around.”
Brigid took a deep breath and nodded. As compassionate as Kane was toward the plight of others, ever since the Manitius personnel had been evacuated and relocated to Cerberus redoubt, privacy and peace and quiet had been curtailed. Beset with a pounding headache, and not at the top of his physical condition, his impatience couldn’t be cast aside by strolling off into the surrounding hills and spending time in the relative tranquility of Sky Dog’s village. Brigid had often joked that she’d keep an eye out for little Indian papooses with blue eyes, but the truth of the matter was, Kane was much like Domi in that they were at home in the wilderness. The trappings of the redoubt were cold and sterile, no matter how brightly lit or colorfully painted. With the addition of more people, Brigid could see that Kane’s momentary musings were not an endorsement of Thrush’s destruction of humanity.
Still, Kane winced internally. “I’m not doing much for my case by being so misanthropic.”
Brigid shook her head. “I’ll bring you some coffee. We’ll start over.”
Kane rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t overlook that kind of a rant if I were you.”
Brigid rested her hand on his shoulder. “Why? It is a sentiment you’d voice if you were too hurt and too tired to get back into the fresh air. In fact, I’d be afraid if you didn’t let some of your rough edges show. As much as we get called heroes, we’re still just normal people who are allowed to be grumpy and hold some loathing for others.”
Kane took a deep breath. “Maybe…but you don’t have to disguise the fact that you’re babysitting me because I haven’t been officially cleared.”
Brigid nodded. “Find us a table, okay?”
“Sure,” Kane relented.
Brigid cursed herself for being too quick to disregard Kane’s rant, but that was an emotional reaction. She went over the pure logic of the situation and she stood on her decision. Everything she knew about the man pointed to someone who’d make a glib statement, a joking condemnation. Throw in the effects of physical trauma he’d experienced, including one tortuous bit of combat that occurred before her eyes, and she really had nothing to flag in Kane’s behavior or speech.
She prepared their coffee mechanically while her intellect threw up a flow chart of possibilities in her mind’s eye. The benefits of having a photographic memory allowed her to visualize a thousand different things at once. In one part of the flow chart, she ran before and after imagery of Kane from multiple angles, looking for details that didn’t quite match. Nothing showed up, which frustrated her. On another part of the flow chart, she remembered the details of the Thrush Continuum’s transdimensional Orb ship. The great ark was staffed by copies of Thrush from across a multitude of universes, though they all bore only minor variations of appearance.
Brigid brought up her memories of the young boy into whom Thrush had implanted his mind. The child had been birthed by Erica van Sloan, and had seemed entirely human, except for an intellect that dwarfed anything Brigid had ever seen, and access to technologies such as the Heart of the World and the nanomachines that rebuilt Lakesh so adeptly. She concentrated on young Sam’s face, processing its similarities to the more adult versions of Colonel Thrush. Thanks to her eidetic mental imagery, she was able to compare facial bone structure, eyes, jaw profile and ears. She ran those pictures through her mind’s eye and sighed in disgust. If she hadn’t recognized the boy Sam as a younger version of Thrush with her infallible memory, then why would she be able to pick up such alterations and similarities now?
“Because you’re being thorough,” Brigid whispered to herself.
“Thorough about what?” a familiar voice asked. A scientist from the Manitius base stood by the table that Kane had selected. Daryl Morganstern gave a small wave to her. “Hi, Brigid. I wasn’t expecting you guys back so soon.”
Brigid’s cheeks burned. “Well, you can see Kane took a knock to the head, so we’re letting him recuperate before we go running back into the field.”
Morganstern nodded.
“I know that he’s from the moon base, but I for one can’t place this guy,” Kane said.
Brigid sighed. “That’s because I hadn’t introduced you two yet.”
“Introduced us?” Kane asked.
Morganstern shrugged. “Well…we’re sort of dating.”
Kane shot a glance toward Brigid. “Dating?”
Brigid set down the coffee cups. “Have a seat, Daryl.”
“Thanks,” Morganstern replied. He sat next to Brigid but turned his chair to avoid eye contact with Kane. He’d lowered his head, hunching his shoulders in a turtlelike defensive posture.
“Straighten up, Daryl. I’m not going to bite your head off,” Kane said. “Dating?”
Brigid rolled her eyes. “Listen, I’m not sure if you can remember past that head trauma, but just because you seem to have been happy to learn from Sindri that we’re married in some alternate future, I’m not buying it.”
Kane took his cup of coffee and took a sip. “We undid that timeline, didn’t we?”
Brigid nodded. “And aren’t you the one who’s always fighting fate?”
Kane lifted a hand to hold off Brigid. “Hang on, Baptiste. I’m not complaining. I just didn’t realize that you’d found someone worth dating from Manitius.”
Brigid didn’t have to look back at Morganstern, who had put a hand up to his eyes to hide his wince. The lunar scientist was a theoretical mathematician and part of a new team that Lakesh had assembled to rework the quantum equations to further enhance and refine the interphaser and mat-trans system. He was also another person who had been gifted with a near perfect memory, and while Brigid was helping out with Lakesh’s interphaser program, they had started talking. Physically, Morganstern was average, and his eyes and hair were a plain brown, though he had a sweet smile and dimples. Still, the pair had developed a rapport.
“There are quite a few nice people who came down to Cerberus,” Brigid stated. “Plus, he’s been a great chess opponent.”
“I’ve played chess with you,” Kane said, sounding almost hurt.
“We don’t need the board,” Morganstern said, voice low and brittle. He looked at Brigid. “Oh. I have you in check on board two.”
Brigid nodded. “Game five, though, I’ll mate in six moves.”
Morganstern winced. “I was hoping you hadn’t taken queen’s pawn into that equation….”
Kane gave a low whistle. “Okay, maybe I haven’t played chess with you that well. How many games do you have going?”
“We’ve tied and drawn so many times, we’ve expanded it to seven concurrent games,” Morganstern admitted.
“And how many moves until mate?” Kane asked.
Brigid glared at Kane. “Excuse me?”
Morganstern flinched at the flare of anger on Brigid’s part. “I don’t—”
“Oh, I know what he meant,” Brigid replied.
“You bust my chops over little blue-eyed Indian babies,” Kane said.
“That doesn’t mean you can be a prick and put poor Daryl on the spot,” Brigid said.
Morganstern swallowed. “I think I’ll go get myself a soft drink.”
“I’m not letting Kane drive you off,” Brigid said. She narrowed her gaze at the man as he took another sip of coffee. “That’s why I didn’t introduce you—because I knew you’d be a pig.”
“Really, Brigid. I’m just thirsty,” Morganstern said, his voice rising an octave with obvious nervousness. “I’ll be right back.”
Brigid puffed out her cheeks. “You’ve got a minute.”
Morganstern nodded, a little too rapidly to be anything but on edge. He scurried out of his chair and headed toward the drink station.
“I’m sorry, Baptiste,” Kane said. “He’s an okay-seeming guy.”
“Yeah,” Brigid grumbled. “It’s nothing big for you, Mister Hero-man, to lay a slick line on one of those barbarian trollops you encounter on days ending with the letter y, but it’s not easy for women. He told me there’s a dozen moon base scientists who are afraid to talk to me because I’m out of their league.”
“You are,” Kane admitted. “Guys are intimidated by pretty girls,” Kane continued. “Throw in the fact that you’re a resident superheroine, able to walk across dimensions by concentrating on funky rugs and regularly prance about in skintight uniforms…”
Brigid grimaced.
“I’m not going to rain on your parade,” Kane said.
Brigid squeezed her eyebrows. “Just drop it, Kane.”
“Consider it dropped,” he answered. “Besides, what’s that you called us once upon a time?”
“Anam-chara,” Brigid said. “Soul friends. That’s if I buy into that jump-dream memory you had of rescuing one of my other incarnations. We’re bound together, but nothing you’ve told me says that we’re some kind of cosmic lovers. Good grief, I’m trying to apply logic to reincarnation.”
“Enlil reincarnated. Fand and Epona recognize my old soul,” Kane offered.
“Where’s Daryl with his soda?” Brigid muttered.
“The nozzle popped on his soft drink,” Kane said. “He and a couple of the other members of the geek squad have the dispenser disassembled and are arguing over how best to rebuild it.”
Brigid looked over her shoulder and saw Morganstern. The young scientist shrugged, looking pained at the brown, soaking stain on his chest. Brigid gave him a smile that she wasn’t particularly feeling at the moment, and he waved at her before walking toward the table.
“Sorry. It looks like we’ve got our emergency to counterpoint whatever crisis you’re dealing with,” Morganstern told her.
“Who says we’re in the middle of a crisis?” Brigid asked.
“Kane’s injured, and CAT Beta is preparing for a jump back to the Poconos,” Morganstern noted. “Grant’s going with them.”
Kane nodded. “I know. I hate being sidelined, but DeFore told me I have a concussion.”
Brigid sighed. “I’m sorry, Daryl.”
“That’s all right. We still have our date scheduled for tomorrow night. Running into you and Kane was an unexpected surprise for the day,” Morganstern offered.
Kane nodded toward the soft drink machine. “It looks like one of your buddies is upset.”
Morganstern looked back, horrified. “Wynan! No, we are not going to waste valuable platinum on diet soda! I’m sorry, Brigid.”
She reached up and grabbed Morganstern’s shirt, kissing him on the cheek. “Thanks for understanding, Daryl.”
Morganstern chuckled nervously, his dimpled smile glowing beneath blushing cheeks. “Brigid, I want to thank you.”
Brigid turned back and saw the smirk on Kane’s face. “You say another word, and I will peel the flesh from your bones and tell everyone that I was certain you are a death pod person from Dimension Fifteen. And they’d never blame me.”
Kane covered his mouth to hold back his laughter. Brigid hoped that in her mock rage, she hadn’t given form to a dangerous prophecy. The man’s stifled amusement seemed to echo in a haunting taunt to her doubts.
Chapter 6
As Grant went over the gear stuffed into the pouches of his web utility belt, Domi remained silent. The two had come a long way since their first meeting in the Tartarus Pits of Cobaltville. Originally Domi had fallen deeply for the dark ex-Mag because he was the first person ever to show genuine concern and affection for her. Since then, both had found the true loves of their lives, and their relationship had matured. Domi herself had matured, and the love she felt for Grant wasn’t something that was based on sexual attraction.
If anything, Grant was a nurturing father figure that she had grown up without, which was why Grant had felt so uncomfortable with her fleeting advances, and then her campaign to scandalize and make him jealous. More than once, she had wanted to apologize for giving him such an awkward time, but Grant wouldn’t hear anything about it. They had both found partners, and now with that stumbling block out of the way, Grant no longer felt aloof toward her.
They could have these comfortable silences together. Though Domi could see a million questions and doubts storming through his mind, Grant focused on preparing for the mission back to the mountain range. It was enough that Domi was there, and though her vocabulary had grown greatly since her arrival at Cerberus, her silence spoke more deeply than anything else. Grant strapped his Sin Eater onto his forearm last of all, and he tested the holster mechanism. A quick whirr and the machine pistol snapped into his palm, then withdrew.
He looked at Domi who was ready for action. Her big, ruby-red eyes, startling globes of crimson, searched his face.
“If that’s the wrong Kane, we’ll find the right one,” Domi said softly.
Grant nodded. “He’s lucky like that. To have us come in as the cavalry and rescue his sorry ass.”
“He’s done it for us enough times.”
Grant took a deep breath and slid a Kevlar-lined load-bearing vest over his shadow suit top. The photocell camouflage of the remarkable uniform wouldn’t be needed, and Grant wanted plenty of pockets and some extra armor to augment the protective abilities of his uniform. The vest’s bullet-resistant fabric was reinforced with lightweight ceramic trauma plates. He’d heard the kind of firepower that the Fomorians were packing, and the AK-47 fired a notoriously difficult round to resist with conventional body armor. “’Course, it would be like him…”
“Shut up,” Domi whispered.
Grant’s eyes flashed with annoyance, but he remained silent. It may have been silly superstition on Domi’s part, but she was not the kind of woman to tempt fate by talking about the worst that could happen. The loss of Kane from Cerberus would be a crippling blow on so many levels. It was his courage and compassion that had redirected and refocused the fight against the barons after Lakesh’s years of quiet, desperate machinations. Kane had forged the bond with the local Native American tribe, and had been instrumental in rescuing societies from corruption. He’d saved everyone’s life a dozen times over.
Domi remembered how Kane had, in a moment of desperation, plucked her from the brink of annihilation with the technology of Thunder Isle. It had been during a fierce battle to escape Area 51. Domi had helped Kane escape a forced breeding program where he sired a new generation of children with superior genetics and all of Kane’s phenomenal physical and mental attributes. In the battle to break loose, Domi had been trapped in the path of an implode grenade, a powerful weapon that by all rights should have turned her into a smear of plasma.
Instead, Kane had discovered the Thunder Isle temporal matrix. He pushed the staff to lock on to her position at the moment just before the grenade’s detonation. In Domi’s mind, she had simply blinked, leaving behind the underground complex and appearing in the time scoop. She’d lived simply because Kane had not given up, because his supersharp perceptions noticed that her supposed death was not how it should have been from a grenade detonation. His faith, his willingness to defy the laws of physics and consequence enabled Kane to wrench her from the jaws of death.
That same undying loyalty had been the impetus to save others. Kane would never think that someone was dead and lost. He’d fight with the Grim Reaper himself to protect those he loved. Without him, the glue that united Cerberus would dry, crack and come apart in a spray of brittle crumbs. Domi would never admit to any possibility that Kane was dead, and she wouldn’t allow others to even breathe that doubt into existence.
It was stubborn and superstitious, but Kane had been too bullheaded to allow Domi to be murdered.
Grant swallowed hard and recovered his ability to speak, but this time, he skirted the issue. “You might want to take some extra equipment.”
Domi patted her crossbow, a large steel one with a reel crank on the side. It was an upgrade of the small pistol bow model she often carried. “Shot through tree trunk with this.”
Domi blushed as she realized that she’d dropped back into her abbreviated outlanders speech. Grant smiled, then pretended that he couldn’t detect the nerves made all too obvious when she spoke.
“This crossbow’s rated at 416 feet per second for a bolt,” she said, fighting down her clipped verbosity. “And the crank allows for fast reloads.”
“But it’s not going to be ideal if a Fomorian comes into close combat,” Grant said. “I’m not so much worried about me or Edwards—we’re as big as they are.”
“I know,” Domi said. “But I’ve got my Detonics .45.” She patted the small pistol on her hip. “There’s a MAC-10 in my bag, too.”
“I hope that’s enough.” Grant sighed. His mind had already let go of the logistical issues of their upcoming trip and had returned to his best friend. It had been a feeble effort, trying to distract Grant from his true fears by delving into the musketry necessary to bring down Bres’s mutants. Still, it was a moment or two where he had been distracted from worries.
Domi took Grant by the hand and gave him a quiet, loving embrace. Her slender arms squeezed around his shoulders with far more strength than they would have appeared to, and Grant responded with a gentle tap on her back.
“Go get the rest of your team,” Grant said. “I want to make one last check with Brigid and him.”
Even as she left him alone in the locker room to check on the status of her CAT Beta Team, Domi noted that Grant couldn’t bring himself to say his friend’s name. Though she remained skeptical of “supernatural” abilities, she’d survived in the Outlands and the slums of Cobaltville utilizing instincts that couldn’t readily be defined. Grant’s instincts refused to allow him to call the man everyone recognized as Kane by that name. The bonds of friendship were strong, and they ran deeper than simple blood chemistry and genetics. There was a hint of falseness, an imperceptible doubt that shouldn’t exist after retinal scans and fingerprint matching.
Domi hated that her own hunter’s senses didn’t pick up anything worthwhile, except that she could tell that Grant didn’t quite trust the version of Kane they carried back through the mat-trans. Whatever the menace Thrush had placed within their ranks, it was something that had been an absolutely perfect duplicate, right down to healed scars and a jawbone implant to attach a Commtact. The similarities were so fine that even Brigid Baptiste’s eidetic memory couldn’t find enough incongruity to give more than a vague doubt on her own.
The balance of the three Cerberus heroes had been altered, and they weren’t certain if it was due to head trauma. Brigid herself had suffered a skull injury before and had taken a while to recover. For a brief period, the three people weren’t at their top game on missions, part of what had inspired Lakesh to form a second Cerberus away team to take up the slack. Domi had done her best to emulate the kind of team formed by her friends, but Kane, Grant and Brigid were a magical combination, a one-in-a-million act of emotional and mental chemistry that went far beyond the sum of intellect and raw muscle. Lakesh had pointed out many times before that their union as a team allowed them to defy the laws of probability and defeat threats that loomed so large, they could swallow the entire solar system.
Domi simply had to rely on skill, knowledge and well-applied brute force for CAT Beta. It had carried them through a few missions, and they’d even been able to contain the rage of a technogoddess gone mad before she utilized an ancient Threshhold device to teleport her from a stony tomb in which she’d trapped the bitch. Even then, though, they’d had Brigid Baptiste’s aid while Kane and Grant battled a rival god and his army.
Together or apart, the three of them in coordination had been a focused force, and any goal they sought to achieve usually ended in victory. Bittersweet ashes from a Pyrrhic win were rare; for the most part, a win was a win.
She didn’t want to think of the torment and horrors that would lie ahead if the three heroes of Cerberus were ever to split up. Kane liked to point out that the core of the human resistance was formed by everyone’s free will, an indomitable spirit. He’d even brought out the old American flag to wave as a banner in the face of the Annunaki when Enlil sent his forces for the first open warfare that had broken out after Tiamat’s return to Earth. The cloth had meant much to the people of the moon base, but Domi’s loyalty wasn’t to a striped piece of fabric. She’d bled and wept with Kane and his allies. They were family. And with family came a fealty that couldn’t be broken.
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James Axler
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Earth remains the volatile prize of aeons of war and domination by two panterrestrial races. Returning the fight to these inhuman overlords, the Cerberus rebels are the champions of the planet′s postapocalyptic dark ages.They spark a uniquely human resilience and courage to stand down the forces of infinitely powerful, perhaps unstoppable entities in the ongoing war to retake Earth for humanity. The Bluegrass range, ripe with secrets and magic, hides the operating base of a race of monstrous genetic mutations, faithful servants of an ancient overlord. As Kane and the rebels stage their reconnaissance, the shocking new face of an old nemesis enters the fray. As this crossspatial cyborg replicates himself as Kane and breaches humanity′s last defense, he may well succeed in wiping the mountains–and their inhabitants–off the face of Earth permanently.